By treating IT and AI as neutral tools, we obscure our ability to see – and resist – power.

While the word “cloud” suggests something ephemeral, the reality is as physical as dirt. Data stored on the cloud is physically located on servers, typically at large data centers, or server farms, which require enormous amounts of energy to maintain. Just three companies – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – control over two-thirds of this critically important market.

A decade ago, most businesses stored their data onsite; today the majority of all business data is stored off-site. The same is true for personal data. The amount spent on off-site data storage could soon approach $1 trillion.

A recent report, “Engineering the Cloud Commons,” by the Open Markets Institute shows how the big three have used a series of aggressive tools to protect their cloud dominance. They are leveraging this dominance to foreclose competition in one of the most dangerously concentrated technologies: artificial intelligence.

Big Tech has become too big and embedded to fail.

By treating the cloud as neutral, we have exposed ourselves to great danger. Concentration significantly increases the risk of widespread system failure. If just one of the big three tech giants collapses, societal mayhem could follow: hospital closures, data breaches, business disasters.

Even without a collapse, we have put ourselves in a position of radical dependency greater than that of society on the big banks. Not only has Big Tech become too big and too embedded to fail; the firms know they can use that power to dictate policy.

The Open Markets report proposes an immediate remedy: Cloud providers should be required to operate in the public interest, offering fair and equal access to infrastructure, with public oversight and rate regulation.

Reporting on AI often treats it as an abstract force, separate from the physical architecture that makes it possible. We treat models, chips and data centers as immaterial when, in fact, they are as structured, owned and governed as a factory or a plantation.

We also treat technology, and by extension the architecture of information, as neutral. Both abstraction and neutrality perform a dangerous social function: They obscure power.

The organization of information is one of the most consequential forms of power in modern society, giving those in power a potent incentive to use the language of neutrality and abstraction to hide it.

Information lives in supply chains, fiber-­optic cables, content-moderation protocols, chip designs, algorithmic hierarchies and server farms. You don’t have to understand how all of these relate technically to understand that allowing corporations to both own the infrastructure and run the services that depend on it sets up an untenable conflict of interest at the heart of our society.

ZEPHYR TEACHOUT is a constitutional lawyer and law professor at Fordham University and the author of Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money. She is a board member of The Nation, where this story first appeared.