Ten years ago, the tech commentator Nicholas Carr published The Big Switch: Rewiring the World From Edison to Google. It was the first attempt to explain to a general audience the significance of the computing industry’s move to what became known as “cloud computing”.

In the book, Carr sketched an analogy between the building of the electric grid a century earlier and the move to cloud computing that was already well under way in 2008. Electricity was once generated locally – every factory had its own generator – but eventually it was provided by huge generating stations run by large utility companies and distributed through a national network: the grid. The same process, Carr argued, would happen (indeed, was happening) to data processing. Instead of being done locally – in the server-rooms of individual organisations – it would be done in huge server farms and the results distributed through a national (now international) network: the internet.

Broadly, all this has come to pass. In fact, the networked world we now inhabit is only possible because of cloud computing. That smartphone of mine would be just an expensive paperweight without it. Everything that happens when we use Google, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Hotmail, Instagram, Flickr, Netflix, Spotify, Google Translate and the rest is accomplished by a combination of server-farm computation and internet bandwidth. That doesn’t mean that no computation is being done locally on our desktop, laptop and mobile devices, but without their umbilical connections to the cloud their usefulness would be severely curtailed.

‘Nicholas Carr was right: history did repeat itself.’ Photograph: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images

Cloud computing is just a metaphor. It has its origins in the way network engineers in the late-1970s used to represent the internet as an amorphous entity when they were discussing what was happening with computers at a local level. They just drew the net as a cartoonish cloud to represent a fuzzy space in which certain kinds of taken-for-granted communication activities happened. But since clouds are wispy, insubstantial things that some people love, the fact that what went on in the computing cloud actually involved inscrutable, environmentally destructive and definitely non-fuzzy server farms owned by huge corporations led to suspicions that the metaphor was actually a cosy euphemism, formulated to obscure a more sinister reality.

To engineers, Carr’s analogy of electricity had an agreeably deterministic ring to it. Putting more and more computational services in the cloud seemed the rational thing to do. Just as anyone could get electrical power simply by plugging into a socket, why shouldn’t everyone be able to get data-processing power by switching on their phones? People could keep all their data in the cloud, backed up and protected by industrial-scale hardware and expertise.

Cloud computing was what made services such as Hotmail, the first big “free” webmail service, possible. And it was what enabled Salesforce to move customer relationship management (CRM) services from standalone software running on a PC to an always-on service availableonline.

True to form, it was Amazon that pushed the technology into the big time by turning cloud computing into a service that anyone could rent by the hour. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was launched in 2002 and offers virtually unlimited data storage, computational power and other resources to anyone with a credit card.

In the pre-AWS days, tech start-ups planning to offer online services had to lay out hard cash to buy and operate their own servers. And if their product was unexpectedly successful, then their puny machines would be overwhelmed by surges in demand. If that happened, they experienced what came to be known as “success-disasters”. Post-AWS, however, all they needed to do was to rent more virtual servers, so that they could effortlessly scale up to meet increased demand.

What this meant was that the barriers to entry in much of the tech industry were dramatically lowered. No more need to buy and operate your own hardware. No more success-disasters. The result – for a time anyway – was a kind of Cambrian explosion in the numbers and diversity of little companies trying ambitious new ideas. The only problem was that whenever these insurgents became successful, they were invariably swallowed by one of the tech giants. Think Facebook buying up WhatsApp, and then Instagram, or Microsoft snaffling Skype and LinkedIn.

So, in a way, Carr was right: history did repeat itself. Data processing has gone the way of electricity – from being a decentralised process to one that is essentially centralised under the control of a number of giant companies. The tunnel vision of tech rationality has prevailed. But if data flows are really just like electrical current, shouldn’t the companies that control the flows be treated like utilities – and regulated accordingly? Answers on a postcard, please, to Ofcom.

What I’m reading

John Naughton’s recommendations

Fire shtick

A lovely New Yorker satire by Rachel Klein on parental anxiety about smartphones, which dates all the way back to Palaeolithic teenagers’ obsession with fire. Contains lots of useful advice: “Have a designated ‘fire room’ in your dwelling … In the non-fire spaces, encourage traditional activities, such as conversation (as much as your current vocabulary will allow).”

Pod one out

A scarifying review in the New York Times of HomePod, Apple’s belated reply to Amazon’s Alexa. It has very good audio quality but is otherwise a depressingly stupid device. It will get better, eventually. You can always rely on Apple to do the right thing – after it has exhausted all the options.

John Perry Barlow, RIP

One of the most unforgettable characters I’ve known. He wrote some of the Grateful Dead’s lyrics and became a great evangelist for internet freedoms (remember his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace? But, as an astute assessment in Slate points out, he was so obsessed with the dangers of government surveillance that he underestimated the harms that could result from uncontrolled corporate surveillance of our online activities.