The one situation that makes cloud providers different than other utilities is that in most cases a utility is based out of the same country as its clients - th

The one situation that makes cloud providers different than other utilities is that in most cases a utility is based out of the same country as its clients - this is a trivial fact most of the time but can become important in wartime. At some point in time if the US goes to war against countries A, B, C it would not be unreasonable to expect that the US government would mandate that AWS/Google etc stop servicing clients in those countries. This is different than an electric utility because in almost all cases the electric utility will end up being isolated on the same side of the fence as its customers.