Roslyn Layton featured on Good, Bad and Ugly Innovation Podcast
Roslyn Layton was featured on Pat Flynn’s “Good, Bad and Ugly Innovation Podcast” about the AWS outage, the lack of regulation of cloud hyperscalers, and the need to include hyperscaler financial contribution to the Universal Service Fund (USF) for infrastructure resilience and affordability
Points in the podcast include:
- Traditional telecommunications networks are highly regulated to ensure resilience, redundancy, survivability, security, outage disclosure requirements, emergency communications supprot, and contributions to rural infrastructure and affordability programs. Cloud hyperscalers like AWS have no such regulatory obligations.
- Cloud service is offered on a “best efforts” basis. Given that cloud represents a single point of failure for the internet, it is now critical infrastructure which should be subject to a set of minimum obligations.
- The outage was related to an AWS server in Northern Virginia, which figured in the last four AWS outages. Requiring redundancy for this server would seem like low-hanging fruit. The cost of the outages, which were world-wide, will run into tens of billions of dollars.
- If we can’t regulate cloud providers to prevent outages, we can at least ensure that they contribute financially to the Universal Service Fund which supports infrastructure resilience and affordability. After all, the top 8 internet companies already benefit from USF connections, some $200 billion per year in revenue, but pay almost nothing into the Fund.
- We live in a digital world, and it’s time for digital leadership.