Ent.com. Immensely powerful, and ultimately helpful. But you have to wait on hold for days.

A lot of people read drafts and helped with thinking on this: @oli.zilla.org.uk @abadie.bsky.social @jordynfetter.bsky.social @tannock.net @seanblagsvedt.bsky.social and many many others...

Governments aren't as weak as they think. They shaped railway markets in the 1800s, electricity in the 1900s. They have the precedent and leverage to reshape the cloud market today. Full piece on @techpolicypress.bsky.social

www.techpolicy.press/the-path-to-...

The Pentagon's JEDI contract nearly did this before hyperscaler lobbying killed it. It would have used $10B in procurement to force interoperability.

Two concrete starting points:
→ Mandate S3-compatible storage in government procurement (it's already the de facto standard)
→ Commodify essential platform services (payment, notification, identity) as open standards

But there's a third path. It's how governments tamed railways and electricity: strategic standardization through procurement power, not ownership.
The question isn't "Can we own our stack?" It's "Can we move our workloads?"

Now governments have two bad options: 1. Accept permanent dependency on US companies 2. Spend billions on "sovereign clouds" that will be just as proprietary
For middle powers like Canada, Brazil, South Africa—& probably larger regions EU, Japan, India, neither works.

Here's the trap: US hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) control most of the world's cloud infrastructure. Their "original sin" was Microsoft refusing to make Azure storage compatible with AWS's S3 in 2008.
Lock-in wasn't a bug—it was the business model.

Thank you Bryan!

I believe this is the gif you were looking for: