Part 2 of 3. What actually gets built once the paperwork is signed: cloud for a business with one building, the box they will not be talked out of, the basics that were the thing you bought, and the agent on every machine that answers to somebody else’s console.
Part 3 of 3. Response times instead of outcomes, a liability cap set at the fees you already paid, and a provider whose excuses eventually arrive at you. The questions that flush it out, what a genuine one does instead, and what it takes to get rid of a bad one.
I counted every commit to Ceph’s main branch for the last ten years — 69,613 of them from 1,718 people across 478 organisations — traced all 38 Steering Committee members to their employers, and gathered the publicly stated deployments. The result is a project that absorbed the loss of its founder and its second-largest contributor without dropping a beat, and is still shipping at the same rate today.
The root of the internet is a 1.5 MB text file that one American company edits and signs. Who really controls DNS, what the 2016 IANA transition did and did not change, and the documented record of how ICANN has used that control.
The .uk registry is owned by its members, and in March 2021 they voted half the board out. What the estate actually looked like from inside, why running .uk alongside dozens of gTLDs shaped how it was run, and how a registry with no regulator ended up disciplined by the only people who could.
Picking a supplier means guessing how they will behave later. The fairest basis for that guess is what courts and regulators have already decided. Part 4 of 8 sets out the findings, includes the cases regulators lost, and draws the pattern.