The contemporary governance of data stored in the cloud is replete with the lasting inscriptions of policy written for an analog era and markets that no longer exist. In the US, the outmoded frameworks of data regulation expose the specter of historical policies that still haunt the cloud wherever it touches the ground. These traces of the past have staggering implications. The effects of this protracted failure of regulatory imagination range from the gutting of the public interest and the loss of digital civil liberties to the creation of a surveillance society that began at the onset of the computer age. By looking through a historical lens, we can identify the deep footprints of these regulatory power struggles to use lessons from the past to create better paradigms for the future.

Jennifer Holt is Professor and Chair of the Film and Media Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024) and Empires of Entertainment (2011). She is also co-editor of the SAGE Handbook of the Digital Media Economy (2022); Distribution Revolution (2014); Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming & Sharing Media in the Digital Age (2013); and Media Industries: History, Theory, Method (2009).