Introducing kill switch

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: Click Here (Recorded Future News)

Episode: Introducing Kill Switch

Release Date: December 16, 2025
Featured Show: Kill Switch (Kaleidoscope)
Host: Dexter Thomas
Main Guest: Dr. Corinne Kath, Culture Anthropologist (Article 19)

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Overview

This episode of "Click Here" features an episode from the Kaleidoscope podcast "Kill Switch," hosted by Dexter Thomas. The focus is on a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that led to widespread disruption across the internet, impacting not just day-to-day conveniences but critical infrastructure like hospitals, banking, and government services. Through an in-depth conversation with Dr. Corinne Kath, the episode explains how the digital world is deeply reliant on a handful of large cloud providers, explores the history behind this consolidation, and considers the social, political, and safety implications of such concentrated power over foundational internet infrastructure.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The AWS Outage: Scale and Impact

• Incident Recap:

  • In early November, a significant AWS outage knocked hundreds of services offline globally, including major websites, messaging apps, smart devices, and even government services. [01:11–02:33]
  • "This was huge. In my decade in the field, this definitely ranks in the top five."
    — Dexter Thomas [01:43]
  • Many users didn't realize a global outage was behind various disconnected services; they just noticed their favorite apps or smart gadgets stopped working.

• Widespread Consequences:

  • Examples included malfunctioning smart beds (e.g., "eight Sleep" mattresses), loss of access to apps like Signal, and failures of critical infrastructure.
  • "Thinking about somebody's $2,500 internet smart bed going vertical and trying to cook them alive is kind of dystopian, but it goes beyond that."
    — Corinne Kath [02:58]

• Critical Infrastructure at Risk:

  • Outages affect daily life, from banking to healthcare to government services.
    "This isn't just like me being on Duolingo or Snapchat, right? It is banking. It is the hospitals. It is education..."
    — Dexter Thomas [03:41]

2. The Anatomy of Cloud Dependency

• Only three major providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) account for almost two-thirds of the world's cloud infrastructure. If one suffers disruption, a significant portion of the Internet is affected. [03:58–04:38]

• Many apps and websites default to certain data centers (particularly the AWS Virginia cluster), further centralizing risk. [06:07]

  • "About 35 to 40% of all AWS traffic goes through it."
    — Dexter Thomas [06:07]

• Technical Explainer: The DNS Bug

  • The AWS outage was due to a Domain Name System (DNS) error in the Virginia data center.
  • Dexter uses a relatable metaphor: if your navigation app can’t find the library, you (and everyone else) can’t do your work—even though it’s still physically there. When the problem is fixed, there's a "stampede" as everyone reconnects, causing further backlog and delay. [07:13–09:45]

3. Repeated Cloud Outages: Patterns and Precedents

• Not the first major outage; previous large-scale outages affected Microsoft Azure (e.g., CrowdStrike update failure in 2024 that grounded airlines and impacted hospitals). [10:01–10:42]

  • "When you are in an ambulance being sped to a hospital, you don't want to show up there on the other end and them telling you I'm sorry, computer says no."
    — Corinne Kath [11:09]

• Such incidents are becoming disturbingly routine, yet infrastructure vulnerabilities remain unaddressed. [11:45–12:29]

• Even during their conversation, another cloud outage (Xbox, Minecraft, banks, train systems) was occurring, directly affecting elections in the Netherlands. [12:41]

  • "The outage was directly interfering with the democratic process."
    — Dexter Thomas [13:40]

4. How Did Amazon Become the Internet’s Backbone?

• Origin story: AWS began as a "side hustle," renting out Amazon's extra compute capacity.

• AWS solved a core risk for startups (scalability, cost flexibility), popularizing the "rent, not buy" model for servers and developer tools. [14:31–17:09]

  • "They were solving for a problem that companies were already starting to have... But it also meant that the Internet became really reliant on Amazon."
    — Corinne Kath [15:52]

• Interdependencies have grown complex; software is now a “web of building blocks,” with each block relying on others, deepening systemic risk. [17:09]

• AWS now accounts for more than half of Amazon's operating income. Google and Microsoft followed, leading to the current oligopoly. [17:47]

• Notable Metaphor:
  "In what situation would you accept only three companies being responsible for all of agriculture?... We need to start changing our perception of what the digital is because it is everything."
  — Dexter Thomas [18:20]

5. Monopoly vs. Resilience: Economic and Social Arguments

• The cost and frequent updates required for cloud infrastructure create high barriers to competition. VCs are unwilling to fund alternatives to the Big Three. [19:29–20:39]

  • "It's a bad investment right now."

• Some argue "big is better" for reliability (resources, scale), but Corinne sees political and societal dangers in this monopolization. [20:39–22:03]

  • "It's very easy for people to say, 'Oh, it's just a technical mistake and we should be allowed to make technical mistakes.' But that is not an argument we would accept from the company that operates our water or electricity..."
    — Dexter Thomas [21:00]

• Outages are not just technical failures—they have major political and individual consequences and illustrate a “democratic deficit.”

6. Rethinking Digital Sovereignty and Possible Alternatives

• European leaders are debating "digital sovereignty," seeking to reduce dependence on U.S. cloud giants. But non-monopolistic, globally fair alternatives are needed (not just defense contractors). [24:48–26:06]

• Non-profits and universities have successfully built distributed, independent systems (e.g., Wikipedia and Dutch universities collaborating on university-specific cloud infrastructure). [26:14–27:23]

• Historically, the ARPANET (precursor to the Internet) was intentionally designed without single points of failure, unlike today’s monopoly-driven structure. [27:31–28:12]

• Promising Projects:

  • University of Amsterdam's Critical Infrastructure Lab and Brussels’ Institute for Technology in the Public Interest: exploring radical alternatives like compostable data centers and “cloud abolitionist” agendas. [28:42–29:51]
  • "We need people who will actually question the premises and not just try and improve what we have already."
    — Dexter Thomas [29:51]

7. The Future: Is This Problem Getting Worse?

• Outages are happening frequently and affecting more essential sectors as more critical infrastructure (e.g., trains, healthcare) moves to cloud. [29:51–30:53]

  • "Are we likely to see this more in the future? Absolutely. Will the impact be bigger every time? Yes..."
    — Dexter Thomas [30:08]

• Example: Even everyday conveniences (like using a phone to pay for LA transit) have high-stakes consequences if the cloud fails (risk of police harassment, etc.). [30:53]

8. Who Should Decide What We Can Access Online?

• Highlight of AWS’s decision to deplatform Parler after Jan. 6th as an example of private power controlling public discourse. [31:24–32:30]

  • "What this has shown us is the specific power dynamic of how these cloud companies get to decide who gets to use their services and by extension, who gets to exercise their rights online."
    — Dexter Thomas [32:30]

• Critical communication tools (like Signal) rely on AWS. What if AWS withdrew support due to policy or politics? [33:17–33:40]

• The Accountability Question:

  • Holding cloud giants accountable is challenging for individuals, but legal and political advocacy (such as lawsuits over unfair licensing) is possible. [33:40–34:40]
  • "The entirety of the weight of that corporate power comes bearing down on you. So you need to have the kind of backbone to take on that backbone."
    — Dexter Thomas [34:40]

• At minimum, ask institutions about contingency plans: "Not if, but when that [cloud] service goes offline next."
  — Corinne Kath [34:40–35:32]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• "This was huge. In my decade in the field, this definitely ranks in the top five."
  — Dexter Thomas [01:43]
• "Thinking about somebody's $2,500 internet smart bed going vertical and trying to cook them alive is kind of dystopian, but it goes beyond that."
  — Corinne Kath [02:58]
• "When you are in an ambulance being sped to a hospital, you don't want to show up there on the other end and them telling you I'm sorry, computer says no."
  — Corinne Kath [11:09]
• "In what situation would you accept only three companies being responsible for all of agriculture?... We need to start changing our perception of what the digital is because it is everything."
  — Dexter Thomas [18:20]
• "It's very easy for people to say, 'Oh, it's just a technical mistake and we should be allowed to make technical mistakes.' But that is not an argument we would accept from the company that operates our water or electricity..."
  — Dexter Thomas [21:00]
• "What this has shown us is the specific power dynamic of how these cloud companies get to decide who gets to use their services and by extension, who gets to exercise their rights online."
  — Dexter Thomas [32:30]
• "The entirety of the weight of that corporate power comes bearing down on you. So you need to have the kind of backbone to take on that backbone."
  — Dexter Thomas [34:40]

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Key Segment Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |---------------------------------------------------------------------|------------------| | Outage recap and AWS’s criticality | 01:11–03:41 | | Dependency on AWS and the AWS Virginia data center | 05:07–07:13 | | DNS error metaphor and impact explanation | 07:13–09:45 | | Past outages: Microsoft Azure, real-world hospital risks | 10:01–12:29 | | Cloud monopoly origins and market structure | 14:31–17:47 | | Monopoly critique: infrastructure as public good | 17:47–22:03 | | European digital sovereignty, alternatives to cloud monopoly | 24:48–27:23 | | ARPANET history and lessons for modern Internet design | 27:31–28:28 | | Cloud accountability, AWS’s content moderation power | 31:24–32:30 | | Calls to action, systemic vs. individual solutions | 33:53–35:32 |

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Tone & Style Notes

• Dexter Thomas uses everyday analogies, humor, and accessible metaphors to explain technical concepts.
• Dr. Corinne Kath blends technical clarity with frank social and political commentary.
• The episode maintains an urgent, conversational, and slightly irreverent but deeply informed tone throughout.

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Takeaway

The episode brings into sharp relief how invisible yet essential internet infrastructure has become to every aspect of modern life—and the risks society faces by concentrating so much control in so few hands. Outages are not rare, and as dependency deepens, the impact grows. The solution is not solely technical: it demands rethinking digital power, pushing for political accountability, and imagining alternative models rooted in public interest and resilience.

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Transcript

[Dina Temple Raston]

From recorded future news and prx, this is click here. Hi, it's Dena. While the Click Here team takes a brief winter break, we want to share an episode from our friends over at Kaleidoscope. They make some terrific tech podcasts and one of the shows we've been really enjoying is Kill Switch. Host Dexter Thomas has a gift for helping listeners make sense of the right now of our tech fueled lives. And back in early November, he turned his attention to a massive Internet outage tied to Amazon Web Services, the cloud provider behind many of the world's most essential online services. When big chunks of the Internet suddenly went dark, Amazon traced the issue to a data center, Northern Virginia, which left the Kill Switch team with one big question. How did this happen? Take a listen.

[Dexter Thomas]

We have breaking news for you this morning. A widespread Internet outage has caused major disruptions for some of the biggest web services in the world. There's a good chance today that some website app or service that you tried to use today was down. That's following an outage from Amazon Web Services.

[Corinne Kath]

Amazon Web Services, the backbone of the the Internet, suffered a major outage that took hundreds of services offline across the globe. Monday morning, October 20th, Americans woke up to news of a massive Internet outage. And it wasn't just America.

[Dexter Thomas]

I think one of the things to really note about this outage is that it was one of the biggest in recent history. In my decade in the field, this definitely like ranks in the top five.

[Corinne Kath]

Dr. Corinne Kath is a culture anthropologist and she works at the human rights organization article 19. She researches Internet infrastructure, AI, cloud computing, and basically how technology affects our day to day lives.

[Dexter Thomas]

I have asked some of my colleagues, like veterans of the field who've been in the industry since the Internet was born, and they pretty much said the same thing, like this was huge.

[Corinne Kath]

A lot of people didn't necessarily know that there was some global Internet outage going on. They just knew that there was some website or service that they used that wasn't working, like their favorite messaging app or even their smart bed.

[Dexter Thomas]

Some of these are kind of benign or even funny. Like there were some excellent threads on the Internet about people who had Internet connected mattresses.

[Corinne Kath]

Oh, the beds.

[Dexter Thomas]

Yes, yes, the beds. Oh my God. Apods. Shout out to apods and everyone who thought it was a good idea to buy an Internet connected bed. I swear to God, this is why we don't have a single interconnected dev like in our house.

[Corinne Kath]

Corinne's talking about these really expensive smart beds by this company called eight Sleep. Their mattresses are supposed to track your biometric data and get hotter or cooler, depending on what your body needs. They're also connected to the Internet, and apparently they didn't work offline. After the outage started, some of the mattresses overheated or wouldn't recline. Thinking about somebody's $2,500 Internet smart bed going vertical and trying to cook them alive is kind of dystopian, but it goes beyond that. This thing took down everything from Amazon's own products like ring doorbells and Alexa, to sites like Reddit, to messaging apps like Signal, to government services. These outages can impact basically every part of your life.

[Dexter Thomas]

This isn't just like me being on Duolingo or me being on Snapchat, right? It is banking. It is the hospitals. It is education, like, it is things that matter in my life, they've met her in everyone's life.

[Corinne Kath]

The world today relies on basically three major cloud computing services. When one of those goes down, so does a huge chunk of the Internet. So what causes these outages? How do we get to the point where so much of the Internet relies on just three big tech companies? And can that ever change? From kaleidoscope and iheart podcasts, this is kill switch. I'm dexter thomas.

[Dexter Thomas]

Goodbye.

[Corinne Kath]

What exactly happened on October 20th?

[Dexter Thomas]

So what essentially happened is that there was an outage within Amazon Web Services. Now, Amazon Web Services is a leading cloud computing company. And what is super important to know is that Amazon currently has at least 30% of the global cloud market share.

[Corinne Kath]

We sometimes think of the cloud as something that lives in this virtual space, not as something tangible. But the cloud relies on very real and physical data centers that are located around the world. These things store code and data and move around that data to make the apps that you use or the Internet run. And as Corinne just pointed, out, about a third of the global Internet relies on one company for cloud computing, Amazon Web Services.

[Dexter Thomas]

This company operates data centers worldwide that a lot of the Internet and a lot of applications rely on. And so what happened is, within their data center clusters, one of the oldest and biggest one had a bug in the automation software that subsequently took down all of the companies that relied on that data center.

[Corinne Kath]

Basically, the reason this outage was so widespread was because there was an issue with one specific and heavily relied upon data center that's located in Virginia.

[Dexter Thomas]

I've seen estimates of, you know, a billion pings per day going to this particular data center in Virginia. And a ping is essentially like when a company needs something from that database. And because this data center was one of the biggest and one of the oldest, about 35 to 40% of all AWS traffic goes through it. Another reason why this impact was so big is if you are a software developer and, like, you buy AWS to develop your software on, this region is the default. So, like, if you don't switch the default, this is where your stuff will be housed.

[Corinne Kath]

And so you have a third of the world's Internet relying on this one company. Within that, there's this one data center that becomes a default for all kinds of new apps and websites. That data center had a DNS error. The DNS, the domain name system, translates a written website into an IP address that a computer can then decode and understand. You might have heard this described as the phone book of the Internet, but Corinne has a better explanation.

[Dexter Thomas]

So I'm going to try and do a different metaphor to explain this, because the phone book is really useful in a sense that what it does is it connects names to numbers, and that is what the domain name system does. So when you type in a website, you type in Riverside fm, not the very long number that is behind it, which is actually how machines find each other. The problem with the phone book metaphor is I've held one. I know what they look like and what they feel like. But most people younger than me, that is not a helpful metaphor at all. So the way that I try to explain what happened with AWS is imagine you're using Google Maps or Waze or some sort of navigation app because you want to go to the library, because you need a specific book to do your job. But essentially what happens is there's a software bug, and that causes your app, your map app, to essentially indicate that the library no longer exists, even though the library is right there. Right. It is fully operational, but you just no longer can see how to get there. And you're stuck with two problems. The first one being is you cannot navigate to the library. And secondly, you cannot access the information that you need. And so you can't do your work. And that's essentially what happened with the AWS outage. But the problem is, like, you're not the only one who needs the library. The writer on your team needs access to it for research. The accountant needs it for whatever financial records or software. Your lawyer needs it for the database with case law, right? But when the map says the library doesn't exist, it pretty much doesn't show up. And so everyone's work stops simultaneously. And what AWS figured out is like fixing that map is not easy. You have to take all of these steps. You have to identify which version of the mapping software each person is using, push all of the updates to all of the systems, wait for everything to restart, and then verify that everyone can see the library again on the map. And then you get this really interesting part where when you fixed it and the library is reachable again, there's a stampede because everyone realizes like, oh, it's back up. So we now all need to go there and everyone who's done like Black Friday shopping knows what that leads to. And that is also why it took so long, right? Like, because one thing is fixing the problem and subsequently you have to deal with the backlog of everyone trying to like get through the door simultaneously and the system not being able to deal with that either.

[Corinne Kath]

This isn't the first time the cloud services have had an error like this. But because of how many applications rely not only on AWS but on this one data center, the effects of the outage were really widespread. And outages of this scale can cause some very real problems.

[Dexter Thomas]

This is not the first outage, not the first big one, right? The last big one was on 19 July 2024. And the reason why I remember that date so precisely is because it happens to be the day that my second born was born. And for reasons, I had to be rushed to the hospital and it was like urgent. This was no joke. And that was another data There was a massive outage, but this time it was CrowdStrike, Microsoft Cloud.

[Corinne Kath]

In this incident last year in 2024, what happened was a faulty update by the security company CrowdStrike caused a major outage for Microsoft's Azure cloud services. This one brought down airlines, banks and even emergency services.

[Dexter Thomas]

The massive Microsoft outage impacting businesses around the world, taking some companies temporarily offline and for forcing major American airlines to ground flights. The outage affected government entities and news organizations as well as almost every industry across the globe, including banks, airports, healthcare providers and retailers. There were a number of hospitals in the Netherlands where I'm based, where those issues were such that they couldn't help patients. Now, luckily that wasn't in my region, but when you are in an ambulance being sped to a hospital, you don't want to show up there on the other end and them telling you I'm sorry, computer says no. You know, it's the apps and it's the benign stuff, but it's also the very serious stuff that we have connected to these clouds Healthcare, education, banking, access to your government. These are all things that are so critical for people's lives. Like what happens when that is not accessible. I mean, I am sure that there are people who missed funerals, who were not able to make really crucial payments that needed to be made that day, that didn't get whatever benefits that they really needed to. This is not an incident because it keeps happening. When this happened, like the organization that I work for, Article 19, like, we had a blog out within two hours at best and people were like, wow, you guys are so fast. Like, how did you put that together? And I'm like, well, it's of kind, kind of depressing because this is the fourth time in four years that I see an outage quite like this. And all I have to do every time is I switch out the name of the company and I look into the specifics of where they fail technically and then it's the same op ed. And so we just, you know, here we are.

[Corinne Kath]

That is depressing. That is depressing. It's wild too. You said it keeps happening. You might already know this, but I asked you on to talk about aws. Do you know Minecraft is down right now?

[Dexter Thomas]

Oh, I did not see that because I was preparing for talking to you guys and not.

[Corinne Kath]

Not doing your job. I kept you from doing your job. Yeah, no, I think Xbox is down right now. Microsoft's Azure was once again experiencing an outage. At that point in the interview, all I'd seen was that Xbox and Minecraft were down. But as always, it's bigger than that. It turns out banks got hit with it too, and so did parts of the train system, which was a problem because it also happened to be election day in the Netherlands where Corinne is. And the disruption to Dutch railways meant that some people might not be able to make it home in time to vote. So the outage was directly interfering with the democratic process. Microsoft's share of cloud computing isn't as big as Amazon's, but it's a close second. And together with Google, these three companies make up almost two thirds of the entire cloud infrastructure, meaning that two thirds of the Internet relies on Google, Amazon and Microsoft keeping their act together. So how did we get here? After the break, the origin story of Amazon Web Services.

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[Corinne Kath]

How did we get to the point where the bookseller became the backbone of most of the Internet?

[Dexter Thomas]

So there are multiple origin stories around, like how AWS became aws. A lot of the work that people put out there now, like, very much follows AWS's iteration of events. You know, we were an E commerce platform. We needed a lot of compute to be able to do that. And then at one point they realized like, oh, in addition to selling the books, we can sell whatever compute capacity.

[Corinne Kath]

We don't need ourselves in this version of the story. Amazon Web Services kind of started as a side hustle with Amazon, renting out the extra computer capacity that they had to other companies. Fortune magazine did an interview with Amazon's current CEO, Andy Jassy, who started out as the head of Amazon Web Services. He said that in the early 2000s, Amazon was starting to run into walls when they were developing features for their site. Remember, at this point, they were still mainly thought of as a seller. So they started building out internal features for their own programmers to use, and they realized that they could sell that infrastructure to other companies.

[Dexter Thomas]

So that is like the long short of it. There's a lot more nuance there, and I think some really great Internet historians are going to be picking through that to bring the inside story. What is definitely true is that they were the first.

[Corinne Kath]

In 2006, Amazon Web Services was born, and it was instantly popular. They were solving for a problem that companies were already starting to have before this. Starting an app company could be really risky, partially because of how unpredictable the traffic demands could be. Let's say you start up a company and your online service just goes viral overnight. Well, if you didn't buy enough servers ahead of time, you can't keep up with demand and you're screwed. But if you did buy a bunch of servers and your company isn't doing so well, well, now you're stuck with a building full of servers and you're wasting money. And now you're really screwed. What AWS did was let companies rent that computing space and power, as opposed to having to buy it outright themselves. Basically, they let them do what a lot of us do. Pay Amazon a subscription fee. If your business gets popular, just rent more space. If you have a slow month or two, you could scale it back. And on top of that, AWS had software development tools, which meant that you could build on top of those tools rather than having to start from scratch. This was huge for the web 2.0 boom. It allowed for a lot of experimentation without as much financial risk, which in some ways felt like a good thing. But it also meant that the Internet became really reliant on Amazon.

[Dexter Thomas]

Companies have gone from, like, largely running their own servers, like physical computers in their own garages, so to speak, to relying on the servers of aws. But maybe even more importantly, like, we've also gone from individual companies building software from scratch to compiling it from various building blocks provided by other software companies. What you then get is that you create this really complex web of dependencies and interconnections where, like, every piece of software relies on another piece of software, which relies on another piece of software.

[Corinne Kath]

However it might have started, AWS is not a side hustle now. It brought in almost $40 billion in operating income last year. That's over half of what Amazon made. Amazon beat Google and Microsoft to the punch here. But both those companies eventually offered their own competing services. And now we have this environment of three companies controlling the cloud that houses the Internet. And what was first just an extension of basically using someone else's computer for storage has turned into something much, much bigger.

[Dexter Thomas]

I think that is the next sort of step that we need to take. Where it's like, in what situation would you accept only three companies being responsible for all of agriculture? We would immediately see how big of a chokehold that would be because we understand how important food is for our daily sustenance. We need to start changing our perception of what the digital is because it is everything.

[Corinne Kath]

The food comparison is really interesting. Like, you want a tomato, you want a hamburger, you want, I don't know, man, some spaghetti? All of those. I don't know why I thought of those three. Maybe I'm hungry right now.

[Dexter Thomas]

10% pasta bolo. Yeah, exactly.

[Corinne Kath]

But all of those three things are, you know, if one company goes down, if something is. One of those companies has a problem, if one of those companies is not safe for some reason, starts slacking on safety regulations or whatever, you just. You don't get one of those three. Or two of those three. Or all of those three. Or whatever.

[Dexter Thomas]

Or you don't eat. Yeah, yeah.

[Corinne Kath]

You just don't eat.

[Dexter Thomas]

There is a reason why these three keep getting bigger, because they are also the only ones with, like, that amount of money to put into something that loses its value quite quickly. Right? Like servers, infrastructure. It's expensive to Build, it's expensive to maintain and you have to switch it out every five to seven years. I've spoken to VCs for research purposes. Just get a sense of, you know, when you get a startup and you look at their proposition and for instance, they would say like, oh, actually we either want to build our own set of servers, our own mini cloud, or we would want to like work with multiple, multiple partners. And these VCs just like burst out laughing at just the proposition of that because they were like, well if I'm putting my money into this and they're going to spend it on like something that gives me no return when they could just do it with AWS or whomever was going to do it cheaper and better, at least from their perspective. I would just never fund, I would never fund something that would also require my money to put into, into machines that are going to die in the next five years. It's a bad investment right now.

[Corinne Kath]

Smaller companies really can't compete with these giants. So you could argue here that it's better that we have these big tech companies monopolizing this. They have more resources and they can afford to maintain the data centers and keep them working. And maybe that is a way to keep things cheap and reliable. But for Corinne, that's not a good enough reason.

[Dexter Thomas]

The thing that I think is important to remember is that these technical outages have political consequences. So it is really important to politicize what is happening here because it's very easy for people to say like, oh, it's just a technical mistake and we should be allowed to make technical mistakes. But that is not an argument that we would accept from the company that operates our water or our electricity. For them to just be like, I'm sorry it's winter, but for the next 12 hours no heat in your house or no clean water, so your kids are thirsty. Too bad. And somehow with these companies we've decided that they get a pass or like, maybe even better, like they've just lobbied such that there isn't that much or enough, at least from my perspective, oversight on, you know, them making these mistakes and that having really potentially life altering consequences and that I very much see as a democratic deficit.

[Corinne Kath]

So what can we do about this? How do we take back computing power from the hands of a few big corporations? That's after the break.

[Dina Temple Raston]

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[Corinne Kath]

You should tell the people who we are and what our new show is. I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob Goldstein and we used to host a show called Planet Money and now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history and some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name, decided to call it business history.

[Recorded Future News Announcer]

You know why?

[Corinne Kath]

Why?

[Dexter Thomas]

Because it's a show about the history.

[Dina Temple Raston]

Of business available everywhere you get your podcasts.

[Corinne Kath]

The same week as the AWS outage, political leaders in Europe met in Brussels for a summit and one of the items on the agenda was this idea of European digital sovereignty. Basically figuring out a way to untangle Europe from being so reliant on these big US Tech companies.

[Dexter Thomas]

I'm actually quite critical of people who are very focused on European digital sovereignty because I'm like, well, the world's a big place and you just fort Europe is where you put your digital borders. That's not good enough. The perspective needs to be one of global solidarity always. And I have been in the room with politicians representing the Greens or left wing parties back home who without irony have said, oh, well, you know, we need to start looking for alternatives. But the only ones that are perhaps available to us or that have experience running these kind of networks at that kind of scale are defense contractors. And I would be sitting there picking my job from the floor being like, wait, the choice that we are giving ourselves here is AWS or defense contractors, right? That is a rock and a hard place. We have to think of something else that is not this.

[Corinne Kath]

Instead of looking to Silicon Valley or the military for the answer, Corrine says we should be thinking about nonprofits and universities for ideas here.

[Dexter Thomas]

Now, it's not impossible. Wikipedia does it. They specifically have a setup that has them, I want to say, like across the seven different data centers across numerous continents and none of them are the big three. But that would be much harder to do for something like signal, right where latency and constant uptime is much more visible when it doesn't work than with something like Wikipedia. There are alternatives, but it requires us to also change our expectations and it requires the people, more importantly who put money into this, who literally have skin in the game, to change theirs. So it's cultural change as well. It's not only technical. Locally we work with small medium enterprises to see what they are thinking of. The universities in the Netherlands have taken some really interesting steps where they have all come together with local providers to say, okay, well we are roughly the same kind of institute. Here are the needs that we all have. Could you build us something that is like fit for purpose for universities?

[Corinne Kath]

So there is a kind of precedent for what Corinne's advocating here. And the day we did this interview was also an important anniversary.

[Dexter Thomas]

Today is 29th October, which is ARPANET launch day. ARPANET is the precursor to the Internet. And in 10-29-69, the first message was sent over the ARPANET.

[Corinne Kath]

So the ARPANET was basically a pre Internet network that was developed as a collaboration between universities and the U.S. department of Defense way back in the 60s.

[Dexter Thomas]

And it's interesting because like that version of the Internet was designed to be resilient. It was designed to route around problems or failures like the ones that we saw with aws. It was designed to fundamentally like not have choke points and concentration points.

[Corinne Kath]

And so you're, you're taking us back to arpanet.

[Dexter Thomas]

I can't believe that that is where we. Yep. Yeah, it's. It's full circle.

[Corinne Kath]

No, but I mean, isn't that what's happening is. I mean, we're talking about universities without a profit motive.

[Dexter Thomas]

Yeah.

[Corinne Kath]

Which is really important here. Without a profit motive, figuring out ways to connect to each other with no singular choke point, and then figuring, okay, we think we've got a system that works, everybody else copy it, but that.

[Dexter Thomas]

Is still operating from the assumption that we need to be moving to a world of more compute. And some of the people that I really take inspiration from in the field are academics, researchers, colleagues, but also artists and organizers who are building technologies, but also ideas and also political worlds that provide actual alternatives. And two sort of examples that I think might be interesting is the Critical Infrastructure Lab at the University of Amsterdam and the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, which is based out of Brussels. And they are doing super fascinating stuff. They are literally like building compostable data centers. They are generating energy out of mud just to show how hard it is to get energy and how much of it data centers consume. They are creating cloud abolitionist agendas. And that is the kind of thinking and action that we also need. We need people who will actually question the premises and not just try and improve what we have already.

[Corinne Kath]

I don't know if this is recency bias, but we set up this interview. I wanted to speak to you about aws. As we're talking right now, Microsoft's Azure is down. Is this just recency bias or is this stuff happening more frequently and are we going to be seeing this happen more in the future?

[Dexter Thomas]

Yes, yes and yes. I mean, we do tend to see the things more often when we're focused on them. And this thing happens more often than people would like to admit. The scale of the impact tends to generate more or less attention, depending on who it specifically hits and. Yes. Are we likely to see this more in the future? Absolutely. Will the impact be bigger every time? Yes, because one of the biggest things that we have on our radar is that there are a lot of sectors that are not yet digitized who are immediately going to make the jump to the cloud. So whatever the next iteration of this is, just because of that, the impact will likely be even bigger than the last one.

[Corinne Kath]

Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about how excited I was when finally the trains and buses here in la I was able to not have to carry around that dumb card and I could use my app. And I mean, this is a real thing because also Here in la, they are introducing police at the entrance points. I would very much like to not get harassed by the police because all of a sudden my phone isn't working to unlock my app so that I can get on the train and they think that I'm lying to them, that I have paid for my fare.

[Dexter Thomas]

Yep.

[Corinne Kath]

It isn't just that these companies are all at risk of experiencing another outage. A lot of Corrine's work is looking at all the ways that these companies control how we live our lives and what it means to have so much power. I wanna point out something that AWS did that I think a lot of people maybe were a fan of. Actually, in 2021, AWS pulled Parler from being able to use their servers. Just for context here, Parler, think of it as a. It's another social media app which was pretty explicitly right wing. Let's just say that a lot of far right personalities have pretty big followings. There's. And after January 6th, a little bit after January 6th, AWS said, hey, listen, we're not hosting this anymore. And I think they told Parler that it found 98 posts on the site that encouraged violence. A lot of people said, good, Amazon doing the right thing.

[Dexter Thomas]

Right.

[Corinne Kath]

Could that potentially cut both ways?

[Dexter Thomas]

Absolutely. At Article 19, we have spent a decade documenting, researching and intervening in both corporate and government abuse of these infrastructures to, like, quell dissent, to make it harder to organize, to make it harder for human rights defenders to speak up. What this has shown us is the specific power dynamic of how these cloud companies get to decide who gets to use their services and by extension, who gets to exercise their rights online. When so few companies control the infrastructure, they also effectively control the flow of information. And that has real implications for our ability to organize, to find community, to access information, to exercise your freedom of expression.

[Corinne Kath]

Yeah. I mean, so many people rely on signal, Signal relies on aws.

[Dexter Thomas]

Yeah.

[Corinne Kath]

And what happens if for some political reason, Amazon decides no more signal Right now? I think it's very reasonable to assume, at least at this stage, they never do that. They never do that. Okay, what if they do?

[Dexter Thomas]

Right. We need to just be prepared for these kind of scenarios and make sure that these companies have a sense of accountability for their role. It's the Spider man quote. It's like, great power, great responsibility.

[Corinne Kath]

So how do we hold that great responsibility?

[Dexter Thomas]

How do we keep them accountable as individual persons? It's very hard. I know that people said, oh, you can start self hosting all of your stuff. And that's possible, but then try and self host your own email right now and then get through the Gmail filters. Just forget about it. But I do think there are other steps that we can and should be taking. I want to give a shout out to my colleague Dr. Issa Stassi, who is a lawyer at Article 19 who is currently taking Microsoft to court for unfair licensing practices. There are things that people can do. It's just, it's very hard. And you know, the entirety of the weight of that corporate power comes bearing down on you. So you need to have the kind of, you know, backbone to take on that backbone.

[Corinne Kath]

So unless you're the head of some massive tech company that's also using AWS or Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, the decision on demonopolizing the Internet probably isn't directly in your hands. This is a big problem and it's not something that any one of us as an individual is going to fix. But at the very least, this is another instance where we should be able to have some transparency. Companies don't have to answer all of our questions, but governments are a little different. We should be able to ask our local officials what the hospital is depending on to keep people alive and what the backup plan is when, not if, but when that service goes offline next. It's a small thing, but maybe that's one step toward thinking about this stuff a little differently.

[Dina Temple Raston]

This is Click here and you've been listening to an episode from Killswitch, a series from kaleidoscope and and iHeartMedia. Special thanks to host Dexter Thomas. You can listen to more episodes wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dina Temple Raston and click here. We'll be back on Friday with a mic drop. We'll see you then.

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