Sovereignty as A Service: On-Demand Sovereignty and Dis/Connectivity of Cloud Geographies

Keywords: digital sovereignty, cloud geographies, data capitalism, political economy of data
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper explores the ever-complicated executions and practices of sovereignty in cyberspaces by critically examining recent efforts to establish an architecture that enables sovereign control over the cloud. Such a framework of sovereign cloud is developed as a response to nation-states’ appeals to regain jurisdictional control over data across borders, which are usually considered barriers to a global digital economy. While some are concerned about potential “balkanization” of the internet caused by state’s intervention, I suggest moving beyond the never-fulfilled promise of a borderless digital world and focusing on the changing organization and configuration of cloud geographies from physical infrastructures to layered virtualization. This approach allows us to reveal multiple territorial or quasi-territorial arrangements that modulate the residency, access and dis/connectivity of data. Following the rich discussion on zones and zoning technologies from interdisciplinary social sciences, my analysis highlights the increasingly sophisticated management of sovereignty—which I call “sovereignty on demand”—through fragmentation and stratification of cloud environment, which de facto facilitate the exchange of data from complex sources and for different usages. Extended from this point, the primary findings of this paper further show how the new managerial paradigms of sovereign cloud attain data mobility by shifting the geopolitical tension among countries to contested power dynamics among governments, enterprises, and individuals.