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
(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.“
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.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Further Reading: Infrastructure Territory and The Geopolitics of The Stacks (2014)
In this and later posts, I want to explain how this shift from territorial to functional sovereignty is creating a new digital political economy. Amazon’s rise is instructive. As Lina Khan explains, “the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it.” The “everything store” may seem like just another service in the economy—a virtual mall. But when a firm combines tens of millions of customers with a “marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house…a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space,” as Khan observes, it’s not just another shopping option.
Digital political economy helps us understand how platforms accumulate power. With online platforms, it’s not a simple narrative of “best service wins.” Network effects have been on the cyberlaw (and digital economics) agenda for over twenty years. Amazon’s dominance has exhibited how network effects can be self-reinforcing. The more merchants there are selling on (or to) Amazon, the better shoppers can be assured that they are searching all possible vendors. The more shoppers there are, the more vendors consider Amazon a “must-have” venue. As crowds build on either side of the platform, the middleman becomes ever more indispensable. Oh, sure, a new platform can enter the market—but until it gets access to the 480 million items Amazon sells (often at deep discounts), why should the median consumer defect to it? If I want garbage bags, do I really want to go over to Target.com to re-enter all my credit card details, create a new log-in, read the small print about shipping, and hope that this retailer can negotiate a better deal with Glad? Or do I, ala Sunstein, want a predictive shopping purveyor that intimately knows my past purchase habits, with satisfaction just a click away?
Read more From Territorial to Functional Sovereignty: The Case of Amazon
FrankPasquale’s work is excellent. extremely looking forward to this new series
Logistics, Power, Strike: Elements for the Political Infrastructure
Introduction by the TSS PLATFORM
This reader collects texts written by workers, activists and trade union members from several European countries, who took part in the discussions promoted by the Transnational Social Strike Platform around the issue of logistics. Since the beginning, as TSS platform we recognised that logistics poses an unavoidable political challenge to any movement aiming to overturn the present conditions of exploitation. Rather than just referring to infrastructures, transportation and delivery, logistics can be described as the underlying logic of today’s capitalism and one of the leading forces behind the ongoing restructuring of production, political spaces – states, cities and metropolis – and social relations. Its specific relevance lies in the constant work of fragmenting and stretching the different knots of the chains of production and reproduction, in order to dispose them according to the exclusive needs of a transnational valorisation and to produce the conditions of a complete disposability of workers’ time and life. Logistics thus includes a complex and multifarious set of technical tools, standards, protocols, organising principles, institutional structures and legal conditions that materially and politically affect the way in which capital attempts to command social cooperation and to govern living labour. The articles collected in this reader and its introduction underline different aspects of logistics which, taken together, show its specific and nonetheless general political dimension.
(Re)narrating the societal cyborg: a definition of infrastructure, an interrogation of integration
The call for this special issue invites us to consider “integrated infrastructure as a response to climate change”. In doing so, it recapitulates a normative narrative wherein human beings play the protagonist in a struggle against climate change in the antagonistic role, and where infrastructure – integrated or otherwise – is the instrument of human action against it.
This narrative raises important questions, some of which are definitive: what exactly do we mean when we say “infrastructure”? What does it mean for an infrastructure to be “integrated”? And is the integration of infrastructure so defined desirable, or even achievable? It also begs a further question, namely: to what extent is infrastructure, integrated or otherwise, already complicit in anthropogenic climate change?
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WHOLE FOODS: CUSTOMER, NOT RETAILER
This is the key to understanding the purchase of Whole Foods: to the outside it may seem that Amazon is buying a retailer. The truth, though, is that Amazon is buying a customer — the first-and-best customer that will instantly bring its grocery efforts to scale.
Today, all of the logistics that go into a Whole Foods store are for the purpose of stocking physical shelves: the entire operation is integrated. What I expect Amazon to do over the next few years is transform the Whole Foods supply chain into a service architecture based on primitives: meat, fruit, vegetables, baked goods, non-perishables (Whole Foods’ outsized reliance on store brands is something that I’m sure was very attractive to Amazon). What will make this massive investment worth it, though, is that there will be a guaranteed customer: Whole Foods Markets.
(via Amazon’s New Customer – Stratechery by Ben Thompson)
Extremely good essay. well worth a read.
STACKS STACKS STACKS - Jay
Between the Net and the Street
RACHEL BAKER DISCUSSES THE NETWORK EXPERIMENTS OF HEATH BUNTING
This essay accompanies the presentation of Heath Bunting’s Communication Creates Conflict as a part of the online exhibition Net Art Anthology.
In the 1990s, as activists, artists, and their ilk explored the new possibilities presented by the internet, communities often formed around shared resources such as servers. In London, the cybercafe bulletin board and, later, the Irational web server—both initiated by Heath Bunting—played such a role role. Run on recycled hardware and software, they offered space for posting and exchange that tended towards the aesthetically and politically radical. In this interview, Rachel Baker, one of Bunting’s collaborators, recalls her experience as a participant in these two platforms, which shaped her own work in net art, activism, and internet radio.
What do Google, Uber, and Facebook have in common? You might think that the answer is that they are all technology companies. But actually it is that they all pretend to be technology companies. This shared lie amongst platform companies is both bad for workers and bad for users of those platforms, Mark Graham writes.
Platform companies in the gig economy, in particular, have a lot to answer for. At the moment, there are millions of people around the globe who make a living from jobs that they source from apps and websites. The World Bank estimates that there are about five million online outsourcing workers doing tasks that range from transcription to translation to writing fake news articles. And there are many millions more doing gig work that needs to be done in particular places: ranging from driving taxis to delivering parcels and food.
(via Let’s make platform capitalism more accountable – New Internationalist)
STACKS // JAY
Geopolitics of AI Forming ? East VS West? // JAY