The cloud is a centralizing force.

In the era of the PC, once you bought your PC, you alone decided what software to run on it.

Now, there's another entity–one of a small, centralized number, perhaps in a different country–that could cut you off in a moment if they wanted to.

The cloud allows significantly better efficiency (returns to scale, better utilization) but like all centralization creates brittleness.

Centralization emerges in most systems; because data is so quick and cheap to move, it emerges in the world of data faster than in the world of atoms.