“When you use your phone to order an Uber or make a doctor’s appointment, it’s likely going through one of our data centers,” Baumann told a Minooka Village Board meeting in January.
“We consider ourselves a utility, like water or sewer or electricity. It has that kind of importance to everyday life,” he said.
But Equinix is not a regulated utility like ComEd or Peoples Gas. Equinix is a publicly traded company whose top shareholders are Wall Street titans such as BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard.
It’s a supplier that’s kept on a tight leash by the big dogs of artificial intelligence, namely, its partners, including Microsoft and Google.
Contrasting opinions here from the corporation’s real estate director and the Chicago Tribune. On one hand, it is hard to imagine life today without the Internet, social media, and smartphones. All that data transmitted through the air requires infrastructure including cables, towers, and data centers.
On the other hand, all of this is not considered a utility in the same way by the federal and state government. Gas, electricity, and water have all sorts of regulations so that everyone can access them. They are considered essential to housing. The right to the Internet does not exist yet. And the nod above to the private market may or may make sense; other utility companies are publicly traded and seek profits.
Is this a convincing argument in the long run? Would local officials and residents be more inclined to approve a data center if they think of like a utility or more like a company?
Legally Sociable 