Cloud computing is often cited as the next big thing for the
Internet. Computing services hosted in a undefined elsewhere and just…
exist. Suddenly your web service is just… there. Online. No
worries. Easy, cheap, and civilised.This is not the leap that will make
the Internet accessible to more people; scale and become faster; or get
the “consumers” what they want. It’s a big step backwards. The computer
you’re reading this on is being reduced into a terminal. It doesn’t even
need local storage anymore, it can all be in the cloud!Decentralisation
and distribution of resources can be done to a much larger extent than
we do today. Doing so will move the control and power out to the users,
improve privacy,secrecy and anonymity where its needed, and a
distributed application scales better more users, not worse. See
bittorrent as a early example. Amounts of data that with centralisation
were impossible to move at any cost, suddenly became almost free.Don’t
look up in the sky for answers, look down at the ground where you are
standing. All the resources we need are right at our feet, we just need
to use them. That is earth computing.