Until last week, any computing futurologist would tell you that cloud computing is where it's at. You don't need to know where your data is being stored; it's just on a computer, or more likely computers, Out There On The Internet. Thus Amazon, with its EC2 ("Elastic Cloud Compute") service, or Microsoft with its Azure service, or the most familiar example, Google, with its GoogleMail and Google Docs services, which are used by thousand of companies around the world. (Disclosure: the Guardian uses Google Docs and Mail, and Amazon's EC2 system for its API.)

Indeed, the prestigious Pew Research Center said in June that "solid majority of technology experts and stakeholders participating in the fourth future of the internet survey expect that by 2020 most people will access software applications online and share and access information through the use of remote server networks, rather than depending primarily on tools and information housed on their individual, personal computers" and that "most users will perform most computing and communicating activities through connections to servers operated by outside firms".

We already do, to a large extent: Google's search index lives in the cloud; lastminute.com, TripAdvisor, toptable.com, they're all a "cloud" service. What has been changing in the past few years is that individuals and companies have been able to upload their own content onto those computers – hence the explosion in size of Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, none of which generate their own content. It all lives in the cloud, where one organisation offers the servers and another offers the software that interfaces to the content.

Last week though the premise behind cloud computing began looking a bit creaky. On Wednesday, Amazon dropped the contents of WikiLeaks that had been hosted on its EC2 service. In a very po-faced message, Amazon said that it wasn't the hackers' DDOS attacks that had prompted the move ("those were successfully defended against") but that WikiLeaks was "not following" its terms of service.

Terms of service? Since when did Amazon have the time to decide whether every one of the companies it offers is following its terms of service? And why were the WikiLeaks warlogs all right to be hosted on Amazon EC2, yet cables aren't?

Since then every DNS, which offered a free service so that if you typed "wikileaks.org" into a browser it would direct your computer to the site, has dropped WikiLeaks too, citing the DDOS attack – though strangely it didn't find that a problem while the service was hosted on Amazon. Other American companies, and one Swiss bank, have rattled after them.

Is that it, then, for cloud computing? Has WikiLeaks shown that cloud computing will eventually rain on any sufficiently authority-challenging parade?

The reality is that anyone who manages to get under the skin of governments as effectively as Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks team have done will test the limits of government, and hence commercial tolerance. To see how, do some thought experiments around WikiLeaks. First, imagine that it was leaking /Chinese/ diplomatic cables, telling us what the Chinese thought of the world around them – the wars, the mineral buyups in foreign countries, the hacking attacks against American search engines.

Would you be happy with that? You probably would. Now imagine that the leaks were being hosted on servers controlled by Baidu.com, which in China has a larger share of the search market than Google. Still OK?

It might be uncomfortable for Baidu, because the Chinese government licenses every web company. But we'd be enjoying the discomfiture of the Chinese, wouldn't we?

Next imagine that Baidu takes them down, saying that they break its terms of service, which are that you can't have content that the government deems harmful to the state. Spineless Baidu! Wicked Chinese!

That might come to pass. But in the meantime, precisely that – though involving American, rather than Chinese, content – has come to pass. The list of American-owned companies that have shunned WikiLeaks this week is astonishing, added to today by Visa and Mastercard.

It doesn't mean that cloud computing is a bust; more and more companies will continue to move their data to the cloud, urged on by Google and Microsoft (the latter is preparing a strong push to move clients cloudwards next year). But it does mean that it has not broken free of politics; and possibly the net never will. The interesting next move would be whether the Chinese government will offer to host the WikiLeaks cables – a move that Assange and his team may think goes slightly too far.

In the meantime, though, the cables will continue to circulate on file-sharing systems, especially Bittorrent – which are the ultimate in cloud computing, consisting of an ad-hoc network of users' PCs which have a copy of the main file and pass anyone who wants it a little piece, so that they can't be shut down. Commercial cloud computing is what it says it is – commercial, and so vulnerable to political and commercial pressures. But file-sharing is turning out to be the really resistant form where, as John Naughton points out, the only way to stop it is to turn off the internet. And not even the American, or even Chinese governments, seems ready to countenance that just yet.