Cloud Vendors Say “Know Your Customer” Rule is “Hard”

A Presidential Executive Order (EO) is making its way though the approval process which, if approved, would require cloud vendors like Google and Amazon to identify who is buying server time from them. This is very similar to what banks and other financial institutions have been doing for decades.

But Google’s and Amazon’s trade group mouthpiece, NetChoice, has been whining about this from the beginning.

They say it is overly burdensome for companies have have net income each year in the tens of billions of dollars.

Somehow, they also claim, that the rule would favor Microsoft, but they don’t explain how or why.

The idea is to reduce the use of Amazon, Google, Microsoft and similar cloud services by Russian and Chinese hackers to attack us. They claim that it would be easy for the bad guys to circumvent a system that they don’t want to build.

Taking a more cynical view of things, they don’t want the liability of screwing this up as they tend to do when it comes to things that they don’t want to do.

It obviously WILL cost them money, but as Amazon proudly reported recently, that they spend over a billion dollars a year trying to stop fraud. This is just another kind of fraud.

Probably the biggest problem is that it will add friction to a process where anyone, anytime can instantly provision cloud services, especially hackers, with virtually no oversight. For legitimate companies, once they have identified themselves once, it seems like a well designed system would not add any friction at all. But, then again, you would need to design the system that way.

That seems like at least as worthy a goal as banning TikTok. And, likely, you would not tick off 170 million users.

Stay tuned. Credit: The Record

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