These are some of the highlight sessions from CloudFest 2025, all in one place. You’re welcome!
CloudFest 2025 really turned up the star power as the internet infrastructure industry explored The Human Edge. While AI and data sovereignty drove so many of the important conversations taking place at Europa-Park, our star speakers this year really brought out the magic in our theme of The Human Edge.
Cory Doctorow: Enshittification is Not Inevitable
As one of the first well-known bloggers in internet history, author/activist/journalist Cory Coctorow was already well known to the CloudFest community: many of us had been reading his work since before “the Cloud” was even a term. His keynote was titled “With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It”, which gave the audience a clue of what to expect. And wow, did Doctorow deliver! He discussed the concept of “enshittification”: how companies are making the internet worse by design, for the profit of the few at the expense of the many. This phrase really caught the public’s attention since it’s so easy to understand and fun to say—and it has led to a much-needed conversation about what kind of internet we want.
Doctorow’s keynote was fiery, hilarious, passionate, scary, enraging, and at times surprisingly optimistic—and you can watch it right here. (Oh, and trust me… Doctorow hates printers as much as you do.)
He also made time to answer a few questions before CloudFest even started.
Roger Dingledine: The Many Layers of Tor
The Tor Network is one of the most widely-misunderstood elements of the modern internet… especially by regulators and legislators. So it’s a good thing Tor Project co-founder Roger Dingledine was at CloudFest 2025 to explain what Tor really does, and why it’s so important to everyday internet users around the world. In his conversation with i2Coalition Executive Director Christian Dawson, Dingledine discussed the key drivers for this crucial tool’s adoption by activists, journalists, and even casual users worldwide, as well as the role that cloud service providers can play in fostering a more secure, private, and open Internet.
Here is the conversation between Dingledine and Dawson in its entirety:
We got some of the easier questions out of the way before the festival kicked off. Dingledine later told me that he and Cory Doctorow got to explore Europa-Park together—I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation! In my observation, they both approach global technology from a place of genuine human kindness and empathy.
George Sadowsky: The War on Information Poverty
Computer scientist and Internet Hall of Famer George Sadowsky has dedicated his life to applying the power of computing to social and economic policy. Since the 1960s he has worked at the cutting edge of technology—from telex to the Cloud—and has helped develop and deploy information and communications technology (ICT) to over 50 developing countries to fight against the phenomenon of information poverty.
Personally, I wish we had been able to spend more time onstage: Sadowsky was so generous with his insights and experience. He recounted some of the specific challenges he and his colleagues faced in bringing this new-at-the-time technology to some of the places that needed it most, while providing a fascinating snapshot of what the tech world was like before almost everyone in the audience had gotten involved.
In case you missed it, here is a sort of pre-interview with Sadowsky from before CloudFest kicked off.
Dave Crocker: 50 Years of Email (and Counting)
Oh, email… you love it, you hate it. A basic email from 1975 is nearly identical with dozens of unread specimens in your inbox today, 50 years later. It was the original killer app for networking, with features added incrementally. Dave Crocker, who’s too humble to call himself “the father of email”, joined Christian Dawson to go over some highlights and lessons from those decades—including encryption and the worldwide standards for which Crocker’s original documentation opened the door.
As announced in the pre-event interview, they discussed the impact of hyperscale providers such as Google and Microsoft, as well as the evolution of spam and other emai-based attacks. Crocker and Dawson also discussed Teams and Slack (other platforms you just can’t get enough of) and their impact on email—as well as their inability to become true “email killers”.
(Personally, my only regret is on the production side: we didn’t think to close with Huey Lewis and the News’ “Stuck with You”.)
Karlheinz Brandenburg: Setting Music Free
Oh, this was so much fun—just in time for the 30th birthday of the MP3 format, its creator and Internet Hall-of-Famer Karlheinz Brandenburg joined us at CloudFest! In his conversation with CloudFest Chief Evangelist Soeren von Varchmin, Brandenburg not only gave the crowd the inside story on how the MP3 came to be, but he also gave us a look at the audio formats and hardware he’s working on now.
This was a rare chance to connect with someone who’s passionately geeky about how music sounds, and Brandenburg has dedicated his life to helping the world hear music in the best possible way.
In a special surprise, we had rewritten the lyrics to MSP test-case song “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega, and brought a professional singer onstage to serenade him! The whole crowd was singing along to “Karlheinz’s Diner”—not something you see at every tech conference, for sure.
He also spoke to us before CloudFest kicked off—one thing we forgot to ask: does Apple send him a card on his own birthday, since the MP3 made the iPod a viable product and thus set up the iPhone for such historic success?
Check out the full CloudFest 2025 conversation here:
I bet you can’t wait to see who shows up for the next edition of CloudFest. Oh, all will be revealed soon enough! Meanwhile, be sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter if you want the inside scoop, as well as the latest Cloud-industry market intelligence.
