Online Reporter
Robert Muggah and Misha Glenny
THE image of the billionaire CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, OpenAI, TikTok and X flanking United States President Donald Trump at his inauguration in January sent a clear signal to the world: Technology is going to play a central role in the new administration’s disruption of the global order.
To be sure, there have long been tensions between Washington and other countries over Big Tech — including on taxes, data privacy, copyright issues and antitrust.
But as Trump upends traditional US foreign relations, Silicon Valley’s role is fundamentally changing as well: It is quickly turning into an instrument of US coercion.
As the tech titans align themselves with the Trump administration, willingly or unwillingly, the world is at risk of a serious escalation that could reshape geopolitics, capsize economies and redefine sovereignty in the 21st century.
Deepening geopolitical tensions are already degrading basic principles of national sovereignty — the years-long war in Ukraine, China’s growing assertiveness towards Taiwan and Trump’s threats to annex Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal all make clear that national borders are no longer inviolable.
Digital dependencies are a new, more insidious battleground in a hyper-connected era now dominated by Russian, Chinese and US empire-building.
Arguably the clearest demonstration of US tech companies exercising political coercion and reshaping sovereignty is Ukraine.
Even before Trump’s election victory last November, Elon Musk was conducting his own private foreign policy by restricting Ukrainian forces’ access to Starlink in Crimea, ostensibly to avoid complicity in a “major act of war”.
After Trump’s public takedown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House in February, Musk publicly flirted with the idea of “shutting down” the more than 15 000 Starlink terminals underpinning Ukraine’s battlefield communications.
He later backed off.
Trump, meanwhile, “paused” US intelligence sharing, allowing Russia to retake parts of the Kursk region that had been occupied by Ukraine since last summer.
Maxar Technologies, a private US company, was told to curtail Ukraine’s access to satellite imagery.
Ukraine is under attack not only from Russian forces and Trump’s ultimatums to hand over its mineral wealth, but also from corporate boardrooms thousands of miles away.
Ukraine is no outlier.
Earlier this year, Musk and US Vice President JD Vance aggressively intervened in Germany’s national elections by campaigning for the right-wing, pro-Russian Alternative for Germany on Musk-owned X.
The social media platform has been accused of algorithmically boosting the far right in several European countries.
As geopolitical rivalries intensify and Washington turns against its allies, dependency on US-run technology is about to threaten many countries’ independence.
A handful of powerful US corporations control the world’s digital infrastructure, including undersea fibre-optic cables and thousands of satellites that underpin global communications.
Just three companies — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — provide more than 65 percent of global cloud services, a market valued at more than US$750 billion in 2024.
The US also dominates data infrastructure; its 5 400-plus data centres are more than 10 times the number in Germany (529) and the United Kingdom (523).
While the share varies from country to country, an estimated 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic flows through US-based servers, and most of that passes through a small number of critical locations.
With Trump demonstrating that he is willing and able to weaponise dependence on America, US tech dominance is now creating systemic risks, especially for erstwhile allies that never expected Silicon Valley to turn against them.
In Canada, an official report issued by the country’s intelligence services in 2023 highlighted the exposure of digital infrastructure to US legal and political pressures.
Similarly, the Netherlands Court of Audit has warned that reliance on US-based cloud providers risks “disrupting the country and society”.
A Dutch government adviser recently explained: “We now have the bizarre situation that anyone with any sense can see that America is no longer a reliable partner, and that the entire large-scale US business world bows to Trump’s dictatorial will, but we still are doing everything we can to transfer entire governments and most of our own businesses to their clouds.”
The European Commission, meanwhile, has raised the alarm about the risks to the bloc’s financial system stemming from overdependence on US services and infrastructure.
As early as 2021, the European Securities and Markets Authority singled out risks related to the concentration of US cloud service providers and the implications for financial stability.
And with good reason: More than 90 percent of Europe’s cloud infrastructure is controlled by US companies.
European leaders now fear that Washington could weaponise this dependence — for example, by threatening to cut off access to critical services as a form of coercion, just like Washington did in Ukraine.
As a result, European decision-makers are now asking what happens if Gmail, FaceTime, Microsoft Teams or Zoom were suddenly switched off at White House’s request, leaving governments, businesses and citizens without access to their data.
The real challenge facing Europe, however, is the lack of regional alternatives to US providers.
The satellite layer is equally skewed in favour of the US.
Although more than 100 countries and multinational organisations have registered operating satellites, the US dominates that arena, with more than 11 600 military, commercial and scientific spacecraft in orbit, including more than 7 500 Starlink satellites controlled by Musk’s SpaceX.
The latter provides internet coverage over Ukraine and other conflict zones, perfectly illustrating the existential threats to sovereignty in the digital age.
A single corporate decision — subject to shifting political pressures and the personal whims of a CEO — can determine whether a country’s government or the defenders battling an invasion army remain connected to the rest of the world.
The passage of the CLOUD Act during the first Trump administration gave US law enforcement the authority to subpoena data stored on any US-based server, regardless of where the data originates.
With the politicisation of law enforcement under Trump 2.0, these sweeping rights for the US government to access non-US data have become a central concern for European and Asian governments and companies alike.
There are strong signals that Trump is turning to Big Tech as the next battleground in his war on global norms.
Even before his announcement of sweeping tariffs in April, the White House was targeting countries for regulating US tech giants and taxing their profits.
One of Trump’s first actions after his inauguration last January was to issue a memorandum rebuking countries that were hindering “American companies’ global competitiveness”, singling out Austria, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom for retaliatory measures.
The European Union, the US’ biggest trade partner, is currently considering aggressive counter-responses that target Big Tech.
For example, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has proposed stricter regulations on digital services provided by Amazon, Apple, Google and other companies.
French Finance Minister Eric Lombard said that the EU’s response could include regulation of the use of Europeans’ data by Big Tech.
Regulating Big Tech is hardly a new idea, but measures to do so could intensify in the coming year.
Several European countries have imposed taxes on digital services from US tech companies for over a decade.
The EU has tried to diminish Silicon Valley’s market power, including through the 2022 Digital Markets Act.
Meanwhile, France and Germany have explored the creation of a state-backed cloud ecosystem described as Gaia-X since 2020, precisely to reduce European dependence on Silicon Valley. And in March of this year, more than 100 European tech firms urged the European Commission to “recover the initiative” by helping the EU “become more technologically independent across all layers of critical digital infrastructure”.
Among other things, they recommended the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund to support public investment, including in the semiconductor sector.
But European companies have yet to find a winning formula to compete with the digital behemoths of Silicon Valley.
Some countries have been more successful.
Consider Russia, which has built its own version of the internet called Runet, which can operate independently of the global web in times of crises.
China’s approach was even more aggressive.
Through its Great Firewall, China has cordoned off its internet from most Western platforms, promoting domestic alternatives like WeChat and Alibaba.
Back in 2017, Beijing mandated that sensitive data generated in China must be stored on domestic servers.
India began following suit in 2023 with its Digital Personal Data Protection Act, which introduced local data storage requirements.
Earlier this year, Indian authorities introduced additional data localisation laws that require financial and personal data generated in the country to remain within its borders.
But for smaller countries, developing domestic alternatives is not economically viable.
Building cloud infrastructure requires enormous capital investment and technical expertise. For most governments in the developing world, the pragmatic choice is between dependence on the US or China, underscoring how digital dominance is the latest form of geopolitical leverage.
In an era of escalating geopolitical rivalry, the battle for sovereignty is no longer fought with just tanks, missiles and economic sanctions.
It is also being waged in the cloud, among satellites and along fibre-optic cables.
Nations are finding themselves locked into asymmetric relationships with a handful of corporate and state-controlled digital giants.
The ability of nations to control their own data flows, communications infrastructure and cyber defences, as well as to develop sovereign internet systems and artificial intelligence capabilities, will define the balance of power in the 21st century.
For middle and smaller powers, maintaining true sovereignty may no longer be about guarding borders but about diversifying and securing access to the cloud. — foreignpolicy.com
Misha Glenny is rector of the Institute for Human Sciences. Robert Muggah is a principal at the SecDev Group and co-founder of the Igarapé Institute.
