That's an excellent analogy I hadn't thought of. SLA's between companies is perhaps a proxy in the data world, but nothing for individual users.

When data will become so important/politicized that there will be regulations about data retention?

There are some regulations already - mostly on the side of keeping some of the data for tax/legal purposes. For decades.

(Makes me wonder how all those fly-by-night cloud startups are handling that.)

The reason they are is because of their intrinsic propensity to destabilization, vis-a-vis Minsky and the Financial Instability Hypothesis.

Of course, how you structure your regulatory framework can have adverse consequences, as well (i.e. implicit guarantees by GSEs on mortgage-backed securities). It is further arguable whether or not fractional reserve exacerbates these effects.

I was just talking to my pals at Digital Equipment Corporation and Sun Microsystems about how stable the technology industry is.

Then, I read an article in Google Reader discussing how we don't even have to worry about arbitrary and capricious market behavior from our cloud partners, since we all have long term contracts and are protected against upward price swings from our cloud partners or material changes to the services they deliver.

</s>

I see the sarc tag, but if you had a long-term contract with Reader it'd probably have been a different story.

Maybe. When you subscribe to Google Apps, you get access to applications that aren't necessarily part of your SLA.

The point isn't that these services are bad. Just that you need to be strategic about how you use them.