Is what’s good for Amazon good for America? The week in cloud

Someone once almost said “what’s good for General Motors is good for America.”  The fact that the quote — by a former GM CEO-turned-U.S. Secretary of Defense — got garbled in the translation doesn’t negate the fact that many people feel the U.S. needs to protect its key industries and vendors.  Just last week, for example,  the Obama administration overruled its own trade representative when it overturned a trade ban on some Apple product.

Many rank-and-file U.S. citizens are upset by revelations that the National Security Agency is collecting data on personal email and phone calls and even listening in on the calls themselves. Civil liberties groups have cried foul and European tech companies are parlaying the fact that the NSA accesses data from U.S. cloud companies for their own competitive advantage. And, that, could be bad for Amazon, Microsoft,  Google and  Apple — or any U.S.-based cloud company trying to build more business abroad. more