BIG TECH SOVEREIGNTY: PLATFORMS AND DISCOURSE OF SOVEREIGNTY-AS-A-SERVICE

Resumen

The notion of digital sovereignty has been mobilized by various stakeholders as a response to platform power. In the last decades, the concept of sovereignty has been applied mainly to State responses to exert power over other sectors and organizations. Therefore, the meanings of digital sovereignty have also been used and disputed by social movements, workers and indigenous communities. But the platform companies also entered into disputes about the meanings of this multifaceted notion. As an update of Californian Ideology, platform companies modulate their discourse to say that they are also concerned with issues of sovereignty. Thus, they are reappropriating the meanings of sovereignty through the launch of programs focused on sovereignty. We named this "Big Tech sovereignty", a provocation to mean how platforms have changed the meanings of sovereignty based on their own interests, such as the renewal of discourses in the context of "Silicon Valley dystopianism". Built on analyzes of sovereignty programs of Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet/Google, this article argues that "Big Tech sovereignty" is a way of trying to deflate the concept politically, giving it only a commercial and/or personal framework, being more of an expression of the platform power. Through the analysis of these “digital sovereignty” programs, the article demonstrates how companies framed “sovereignty-as-a-service”, especially in terms of digital infrastructures.