The Obama administration has unveiled a government 'app store' designed to push the federal bureaucracy into the era of cloud computing. The change means some federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress, which store data on private internet servers instead of on those paid for with public money.

Is this not another case for creating infrastructure in the public trust? Not only should you have last mile copper and fiber loops that are publicly owned, but why not a cloud infrastructure? Considering the amount of data that publicly funded projects currently (and exponentially will in the future) use, does this not make sense? I mean, we have public television and radio infrastructure. Roads. Water. Gas and other energy sources. Why not data and information sources? Isn't this like a library? Here is where I think leaning on the private sector is not a good idea, as we've seen with IP infrastructure.