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imgabe

The "experts" in this case are

> Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at human rights organisation Article 19

Dr. Cath-Speth has a PhD in cultural anthropology

> Cori Crider, the executive director of the Future of Technology Institute

A lawyer

> Madeline Carr, professor of global politics and cybersecurity at University College London

A professor. Her bio doesn't say what her degree is in, but she mostly seems to publish in political science and international relations

So, not a single technical expert. Not anyone who has ever run a hosting service before or even worked for one. Just people who write papers and sit around waiting for journalists to call them for quotes.

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Do you not think it a bit too hyperbolic to throw scare quotes around experts and imply the only people who can have opinions on systemic risk are software engineers? I don't think it is unreasonable for people who haven't run or worked for a hosting service to have opinions on the policy aspect or economic impact of hyperscalers.

Anyone can have an opinion, I never said or implied otherwise. Having an opinion does not make one an expert, hence the scare quotes.

The headline is misleading because when there is news about experts saying something about technology, one would naturally think that they are at least somewhat technical experts. Instead the "expert" is the director of the "Big Tech is Bad Institute" who says that "Big Tech is Bad". And their qualification of being an expert is solely that they are director of the "Big Tech is Bad Institute".

And one would hope that the stats being quoted about desktop share were from someone who has been at that research firm in the last 20 years or so. I'm not sure how active he is at all at this point. I have a feeling someone looking for some stats found something old that may or may not have actually had a date on it.

(If I'm wrong mea culpa but I'm pretty sure.)

> when there is news about experts saying something about technology, one would naturally think that they are at least somewhat technical experts.

But the experts here are not "saying something about technology". Rather they are saying something about uses of technology. So they don't need to be cloud engineers or know anything about datacenters, at all, really. What would be required (and here you may have a leg to stand on) is expertise in social and economic aspects of (now) critical infrastructure.

I don’t think it’s useful at all.

What are they going to say that’s useful for making concrete technical decisions?

They can advise on how to write contracts for dealing with these situations after the fact, I suppose.

> I don't think it is unreasonable for people who haven't run or worked for a hosting service to have opinions on the policy aspect or economic impact of hyperscalers.

Yeah, that's completely fair. My angle was more that firstly this doesn't come across as an opinion that needs the expert in question, and secondly this is yet another case of 'Talk is cheap, show me the code', particularly when quotes in the article include "We urgently need diversification in cloud computing."

I feel like the 'We' is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting and there's no mention of the costs of taking on such a task.

Additionally, and awkwardly, it's possible to be both a monopoly in the space but also technically a more stable solution, making the cost for competitors or people willing to use competitors doubly high.

Edit: Realised afer the fact I'm GP to your post, assumed it was mine, keeping the words anyway.

I don't think anyone needs to produce any code. I've worked at companies with thousands of employees who don't use any cloud services.

It can be done, and contrary to marketing, it's probably cheaper and more reliable.

What code is needed to make a decision to go with a smaller provider instead of AWS?

No, it's 100% appropriate. Anyone can have opinions on anything, but frankly, most of them have little relevance to reality. Their use of the word "expert" is supposed to mean the person has knowledge or expertise that renders their opinion on a subject substantially more valid and relevant than any regular person. That clearly is not the case here. If I wanted to know what a random person on the street thought about a subject, I could go ask one myself. The purpose of news organizations was supposed to be to better-inform people by getting opinions from actual relevant experts in a subject.

These people don't seem to have much ability to discuss relevant subjects like what the actual reliability of lower-tier hosting providers is, the value-add to business and iteration speed of having a variety of extra services (SQS, DynamoDB, VPC, RDS, managed K8s, etc) available, etc.

Opinions are valid but also worthless. Just give me a funny tweet to digest the situation.

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