Sovereignty-as-a-service: How big tech companies co-opt and redefines digital sovereignty
Abstract
This article introduces the concept of sovereignty-as-a-service to describe how Big Tech companies, specifically Microsoft, Amazon, and Google/Alphabet, are strategically redefining digital sovereignty through their programs of cloud infrastructure. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of official materials released between 2022 and 2023, we show how these companies respond to regulatory pressures, particularly in Europe, by offering modular and branded solutions that frame sovereignty as a technical, legal, and infrastructural matter. Rather than sovereignty being exercised over platforms, it is now provisioned by them, on their terms. We argue that sovereignty-as-a-service constitutes a form of discursive capture that empties the concept, aligning it with the ideological legacy of the Californian Ideology. In this reframing, digital sovereignty becomes a service to be purchased, configured, and optimized through proprietary platforms. By conceptualizing sovereignty as a site of contested meanings open to appropriation, this article contributes to critical debates on digital sovereignty and technology governance.
12th November 2025
Notes: 1
We need to stop thinking of internet infrastructure as too hard to fix. It’s the underlying system we use for nearly everything we do. The former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, and former Canadian deputy foreign minister, Gordon Smith wrote in 2016 that the internet was becoming “the infrastructure of all infrastructure.” It’s how we organize, connect and build knowledge, even — perhaps — planetary intelligence. Right now, it’s concentrated, fragile and utterly toxic.
(Source: consciousnessofsheep.co.uk)
“The goal was to test if the country’s national internet infrastructure – known inside Russia as RuNet – could function without access to the global DNS system and the external internet.Internet traffic was re-routed internally, effectively making Russia’s RuNet the world’s largest intranet.“
Not long after midnight on Wednesday, California’s largest electrical utility started turning off the lights. Pacific Gas & Electric cut power to approximately 500,000 Northern California homes and businesses, with plans to disable service for another 234,000 later in the day and a tentative third phase of shutdowns that could affect 42,000. For the millions of affected residents of these communities and for California more generally, it’s a big deal—but for everyone else, it’s a warning of things to come.
The shutdown is happening because of concerns that the electrical grid could start another fire that would rival or even exceed the Camp Fire of 2018, which killed at least 86 people and destroyed the town of Paradise, CA. High winds are expected to batter northern California in the coming days, and conditions there are already extremely dry—perfect weather for sparks from a downed powerline to start another inferno. Hence the shutdown, which will affect 34 of the 58 counties in California to some degree.
The cuts, which include northern parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, are expected to last at least several days, but it’s not easy to predict. “Once the weather dies down, we’re still going to have to go out and inspect those lines visually, make sure that the lines are safe before we re-energize,” PG&E spokesperson Tamar Sarkissian told KPIX last night. “If there’s any damage, we’re going to have to make repairs.”
Bees dying under 5G poles
How can we create digital products and services that people can—and do—trust? It’s a question that’s integral to our work at IF. It’s becoming increasingly important as people become more aware of the possible consequences of data being recorded, joined up and used by organisations.
“loose clicks sink ships“ - Antimega
The Varieties of Corporate Power
Corporate power isn’t a monolith. Rather, as the progressive crusaders of the past century recognized, it comes in several different forms.
First, there is literal monopoly: the direct control over an entire good or industry by a single firm. But that’s only the most blatant kind of corporate power: there are other kinds of dominance that are far less obvious.
One of these is control over infrastructure. Infrastructure can mean many things. It can refer to physical infrastructure, like highways and bridges and railroads, or it can be social and economic: the credit that forms the lifeblood of business, for instance, or the housing stock and water supply that provide the foundational necessities for life.
These infrastructural goods and services combine scale with necessity. They are necessities that make possible a wide range of “downstream” uses. This social value in turn depends on the provision of these goods and services at scale to as many people as possible. Where a good or a service is essential and irreplaceable, the user depends on its provider—they are, by definition, in a vulnerable position. So if a firm controls infrastructure, it possesses arbitrary power over all those who rely on the infrastructure.
But infrastructural power can also operate in a more diffused way. Much of the early debate around corporate power revolved around norms of nondiscrimination in serving travelers. The classic example was the innkeeper. The innkeeper is not a monopolist in the sense of massive scale and concentration. And yet, for the traveler in isolation, without other competing providers present, the innkeeper possesses a kind of localized dominance, with the ability to deny or condition service, placing the traveler at the innkeeper’s mercy. Indeed, this understanding of localized power played a major role in the development of public accommodations laws, which aimed to prevent this kind of diffused exclusion through generally applicable requirements of nondiscrimination.
"Gabriele de Seta on China’s digital entrepreneurs, infrastructures and platforms.
A vast majority of current discussions about digital platforms and their infrastructural ambitions focuses on the “Big Four” that are often earmarked under the acronym GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). In his Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek describes how these companies share the common trait of having transformed a single product (a search engine, a smartphone, a social networking service, an e-commerce website) into a platform offering free services and capable of generating revenue through the exploitation of network effects and the extraction of user data. In the Chinese context, the GAFA companies are commonly mirrored by the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) trio of local platform companies that currently dominates the national Internet market. Similarly developed into platforms from pre-existing web search, e-commerce or entertainment services, the BAT companies have consolidated their dominance through acquisitions and investments in domains ranging from big data and AI to logistics and finance.
Benjamin H. Bratton has extensively theorized “the Stack” as a model useful to navigate the vertical overlaying of infrastructures and platforms with the geopolitics of informational and national sovereignty. For Bratton, the Stack is the result of various sorts of planetary-scale computation, coming together to form an “accidental megastructure” that is also a new architecture of sovereignty. While Bratton rubrics the future configurations of this accidental megastructure under the looming image of a “Black Stack,” Tiziana Terranova proposes to reimagine a new nomos of the post-capitalist commons as a “Red Stack,” composed by the three transversal and nonlinear levels of virtual money, social networks, and bio-hypermedia.
The Stack model, along with its speculative mutations that attempt to prototype planetary-scale computation through color gradations (the opaque black of cybernetic black boxes, the sanguine red of post-autonomist politics), offers glimpses of sociotechnical assemblages to come and design futures that might never be. And yet, by grounding their claims in a largely Euro-American experience of infrastructural imperialism and platform capitalism, these formulations overlook a geopolitical site where a different sort of Stack is already consolidating its interlocking layers: China.
Extremely interesting stuff // JAY
On Roman roads and the sources of persistence and non-persistence in development
Although spatial differences in economic development tend to be highly persistent over time, this is not always the case. This column combines novel data on Roman Empire road networks with data on night-time light intensity to explore the persistence and non-persistence of a key proximate source of growth – public goods provision. Several empirical strategies all point to the Roman road network as playing an important role in the persistence of subsequent development.
(via Roman roads and persistence in development | VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal)
Infrastructure and unending empires // JAY