Jennifer Holt, "Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data" (MIT Press, 2024)

May 16, 2025

In this enlightening discussion, Jennifer Holt, a Professor and the chair of film and media studies at UC Santa Barbara, dives into her book on cloud policy. She explores how the regulation of broadband, platforms, and data has gradually eroded civil liberties and democratic principles. Holt highlights the shift from viewing infrastructure as a public good to a profit-driven model and discusses the implications of surveillance capitalism. Her call to action urges both scholars and citizens to engage in the policymaking process to safeguard privacy and democracy.

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INSIGHT

Policy As Power And Privatization

Policy is a form of power that can be formal or privatized, shaping who controls rights and access.
Privatized policies like terms of service often prioritize profit over the public interest.

INSIGHT

Cloud Defined As Three Infrastructure Layers

The cloud is essentially someone else's computer plus all infrastructure to store, process, and distribute data remotely.
Holt frames the cloud as pipelines, platforms, and data to reveal regulatory weaknesses harming privacy and democracy.

INSIGHT

PR Obscures The Cloud's Material Costs

Visible PR about data centers masks environmental and legal harms while promoting an ethereal 'cloud' myth.
Holt mines filings, terms of service, and interviews to reveal what's hidden behind corporate narratives.

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How the United States' regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil liberties, democratic principles, and the foundation of the public interest over the past century.

Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024) is a policy history that chronicles how the past century of regulating media infrastructure in the United States has eroded global civil liberties as well as democratic principles and the foundation of the public interest. Jennifer Holt explores the long arc of regulating broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and the data centers that serve as the cloud's storage facilities—an evolution that is connected to the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media and networks, including railroads, highways, telephony, radio, and television. In the process, Cloud Policy unearths the lasting inscriptions of policy written for an analog era and markets that no longer exist on the contemporary governance of digital cloud infrastructure.
Cloud Policy brings together numerous perspectives that have thus far remained largely siloed in their respective fields of law, policy, economics, and media studies. The resulting interdisciplinary argument reveals a properly scaled view of the massive challenge facing policymakers today. Holt also addresses the evolving role of the state in the regulation of global cloud infrastructure and the growing influence of corporate gatekeepers and private sector self-governance. Cloud policy's trajectory, as Holt explains, has enacted a transformation in the cultural valuation of infrastructure as civic good, turning it into a tool of commercial profit generation. Despite these current predicaments, the book's historical lens ultimately helps the reader to envision restorative interventions and new forms of activism to create a more equitable future for infrastructure policy.

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