Addressing the Elephant in the Cloudless Sky : Designing a Commonised Mobile Network Infrastructure

Sacks, Justin and Coulton, Paul (2020) Addressing the Elephant in the Cloudless Sky : Designing a Commonised Mobile Network Infrastructure. In: Cloudless Skies: Decentralizing Mobile Interaction, 2020-10-06 - 2020-10-06, Virtual.

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Abstract

Whilst the notion of a creating a ‘cloudless sky’ by moving control and processing to the edge of the network, i.e. mobile devices, provides greater agency to users over the handling of their data, it still exists within a privately controlled networked infrastructure. Infrastructure can thus be considered the elephant in the room or in this case cloudless sky. In this paper, we address the elephant by considering a more radical and perhaps utopian perspective of providing greater user agency over the networked infrastructure itself.