Competition, Neutrality and Diversity in the Cloud

The emergence of cloud computing is promising enormous benefits for small businesses, due to the dramatic reduction in IT costs caused by the service-oriented architecture. At the same time, the transition to a cloud ecosystem is more controversial for individual end users, as emerging business models can potentially affect both competition within and across layers, and the end-to-end nature of the Internet. The paper argues that policymakers should work on several fronts, including privacy, security and competition policy, before the transition to the cloud ecosystem can be seen as really conducive to a desirable outcomes for end users. Work in the direction of the inter-cloud architecture and a European partnership for cloud computing should thus be oriented towards an open, competitive environment, compatible with different levels of quality of service, and such that end users can still access a robust, best-effort Internet infrastructure, along with managed services with guaranteed QoS.