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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

Another piece of (effectively) public infrastructure coming under the control of the mega-corporations, and Alphabet specifically.

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I don't understand why people are being so dramatic about them using GCP.

Google absolutely will pull the rug on arXiv in the future. Any corporate entity would.

Just because you are hosting at a company doesn’t mean they are “controlling” it.

Can't they stop providing services at a whim? Can't they do whatever with the data?

Yes to the first, but other platforms that run k8s exist.

No to the second, unless they've come to some sure of agreement with Cornell that lets them.

The first is already awful. Without notice?

Generally speaking all companies are capable of stopping services at a whim, unless there are contractual obligations for otherwise. Singling out Google here isn't helpful unless there is a unique provision in their contract that others don't have.

Also worth noting that gcp has over a decade of continuous service with no indication to think it should disappear any time soon. It's not clear why Google's consumer product strategies can be used to infer how their cloud products are run.

I wonder why they chose not to use in-house tools instead.

In any case, are there any documented instances of Google Cloud discontinuing service or terminating a client's hosting for <reasons>?

Bazel RBE and IOT Core come to mind.

If cloud providers could do whatever they want with their customers data, they wouldn't have any customers.

> If cloud providers could do whatever they want with their customers data, they wouldn't have any customers.

I disagree, but it depends on what we mean by "doing".

Ah, but it's not merely "hosting"; they're rewriting the code to fit Google Cloud, and possibly to depend on it.

Networking and power infrastructure are "under the control of" large corporations also. Without them, Arxiv doesn't exist.

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