You’d have to be living in a cave not to have heard about Wikileaks and its impact on international diplomacy and government transparency (or lack thereof). But what is the impact of Wikileaks to the hosting and cloud industry?
You may have heard that there have been several distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the site in the past couple days with some speculation that it’s a government response. But moreover, to deal with the attack, Wikileaks moved its site yesterday to Amazon’s cloud and was back online. As of this afternoon, however, Amazon had dropped the site after government pressure.
Let’s disect this.
From a legal standpoint, Amazon was protected in that a hoster or Cloud provider is not liable for the content being hosted, however they are responsible to work with law enforcement as appropriate.
From a technical standpoint, two things strike me. First, this is a proof-point for a Cloud hosting architecture as a means to successfully defend against a heavy DDoS attack. Second, a hoster or cloud services provider offering raw infrastructure-as-a-service does not have any visibility into the nature of the content being hosted. Content is not smart (at least not yet).
From a business standpoint, it’s not like Amazon actively solicited and acquired this business. It came to them. That said, a DDoS attack can result in a massive bandwidth bill and whether Wikileaks was a creditworthy customer was certainly questionable and at this point, one can only wonder if Wikileaks paid their bills before getting dropped or if Amazon had to absorb the bandwidth spike.
Regardless, it seemed like only a matter of time before the Feds stepped in, which happened in less than 24 hours, bringing us to the present moment which really does raise a number of interesting questions for service providers to ponder:
- As a service provider, what would you do if today you discovered you were hosting Wikileaks.org?
- How should you respond when the Feds come knocking on any grounds?
- Is it your patriotic duty to comply or your foremost duty to protect customers that aren’t explicitly breaking the law?
What do you think?
-Josh Beil
Director Market Strategy & Research, Parallels
@joshbeil
About Joshua Beil
Joshua Beil (@joshbeil) is the Director of Market Strategy and Research for Parallels, the leading provider of automation and virtualization software to the web hosting community. Previously, Josh was the Director of Social Media & Technology at a Level 3 Communications [Nasdaq: LVLT] where he provided strategic and tactical sales support. Before that, Josh was CEO and cofounder of Skywave Broadband, Inc, the largest commercial WiFi service provider in Hawaii. He was named one of Pacific Business News' Forty Under 40 for 2006, and in 2005, he was named a High Tech Leader by the Pacific Technology Foundation. Before co-founding Skywave, Mr. Beil was VP of Research and Development for the market research boutique, Tier 1 Research, where he covered the Internet infrastructure sector as an analyst, and negotiated and sold subscriptions to Tier 1's research services. Josh has also previously served as the Senior Analyst for Exodus Communications as well as the internationally known market research firm, IDC. He holds a Certificate in E-Business from UCSC Extension, and he graduated with honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a major in Psychology.
No related posts.
