Big Tech Reliance: A Feature, Not a Bug, for Surveillance States
The recent AWS hiccup had Al Jazeera musing about our collective reliance on tech giants and calling for 'digital sovereignty.' While a global internet ecosystem dependent on a few U.S. companies indeed raises questions, it also sidesteps the obvious: this concentration of power isn't merely an accident of market forces. Remember Project Maven, Google's AI drone project for the Pentagon? Or the
CIA's multi-billion dollar cloud contract with Amazon Web Services back in 2013, which was effectively a blueprint for the entire government moving into the cloud. This isn't just about services; it's about unparalleled access. Big Tech's intertwined relationships with intelligence agencies and defense contractors suggest that 'too dependent' is precisely the desired condition. Centralized
infrastructure means centralized choke points and, crucially, centralized data collection. When governments preach 'digital sovereignty' while simultaneously funneling contracts to these very same tech behemoths, one might conclude the concern isn't about independence, but control of the pipelines. The 'outage' narrative conveniently allows for hand-wringing without ever truly addressing the
pervasive surveillance apparatus built into the very architecture of our digital lives.