[lsc]

comment 13:

"In the future your major political affiliation will not be the nation state or even the corporation. It will be your IT infrastructure provider IE Apple, Google, Microsoft or their 2512 counterparts."

would be an absolutely /awesome/ sci-fi novel.

Of course, for it to be realistic, consumer needs would have to grow dramatically faster than moore's law. As it is now, it's too easy to start a new consumer IT provider business, the infrastructure is too cheap. I spend rather more compute resources per customer, dramatically more than google, and I've got two thousand customers, me being some nobody kid.

If current trends continue (e.g. consumer demand for compute power trails moore's law by quite a lot) the per-customer cost of providing IT infrastructure will be so low that those providers will not be able to demand much by way of payment, otherwise some kid like me will show up and do it cheaper. If you notice... most of the online consumer infrastructure providers, right now, are not in a position to charge their customers anything at all.