With everyone talking breathlessly about cloud computing, it seems I rarely hear this mega-trend being called into question. The advantages of moving your computing onto the Internet seem clear: Lower costs, more efficient management of resources. What’s not to like?
According to BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker, the answer is: Plenty.
I had a fascinating conversation with Klinker about the state of his company, BitTorrent of San Francisco, which became the basis for my Sunday column about how TV remains the dominant way we consume video.
But one subject that didn’t fit into the column was Klinker’s views on cloud computing. In short, he sees the move to cloud computing to be a trend that runs counter to the very nature of the Internet.
“Cloud computing is a harkening back to centralizing everything,” Klinker said. “That’s just not the model that made the Internet so powerful.”
Some background: BitTorrent is a private company based in San Francisco that evolved out of the creation of the BitTorrent protocol early last decade. That protocol is open to use across the Web, and remains the primary way video is distributed. The protocol uses file sharing technology to transfer large files directly between users’ computers, rather than storing the content on a central server. A user finds a “torrent” and the protocol finds other computers that are sharing that piece of content (which could be a video, audio, photo or other file) and then downloads it piece by piece.
BitTorrent was a source of a lot of piracy accusations in the early days. The private company Klinker runs emerged out of that to create legitimate services for people to use on top of the protocol. The company now has about 40 employees.
In Klinker’s view, the problem with cloud computing is that it creates a centralized system where companies and people are placing their content or IT infrastructure in a handful of companies and services. Klinker argues that the Internet was built on a distributed model, rather than this centralized one.
The first problem the centralized cloud model creates is that you invest a large amount of power and control in the hands of just a few large players. They store your data, and your users’ data, and that creates a “temptation to look at all of that.”
The other big problem is that the cloud model is driving the creation of massive numbers of data centers which require enormous power to run and cool. “More data centers mean more power plants,” Klinker said.
Instead, Klinker remains convinced that the way to drive the next era of the Internet’s growth is to re-focus on the distributed model of file sharing.
“File sharing is the crowd sourcing of infrastructure,” Klinker said. “It’s a more powerful, distributed model.”
What do you think? Are we following the industry blindly into the cloud? Or is Klinker overstating the threat?
Tags: bittorrent, Cloud computing, file sharing
