Tech industry has been one of the examples where an internationalist approach and the policy of cooperation between companies from different countries - and sometimes states themselves - have contributed to a better society. Whether it’s about sharing knowledge on manufacturing, multiple information security research, or even some new open-source project maintained by dozens or hundreds of contributors, a lot of technological advancement couldn’t have happened without such cooperation. As a result, some countries have become key players in specific technology developments. For example: China has become the major player in supply chains and electronics manufacturing; Taiwan is the home for the cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing; the US has one of the greatest minds in Large Language Models development; and the UK has gained an impressive advantage in fintech.
While for some time it hasn’t been much of a concern, it has changed drastically in this decade. The rise of authoritarian regimes and strengthening of big tech corporations have raised the question for democratic states over dependency on certain providers that follow laws of countries they originate from, especially with the second Trump presidency. After US sanctions against ICC judges, which led to their Amazon, Google & Microsoft accounts being disconnected, Canada and European countries have been the quickest to realise that the excessive dependence on US big tech has become a liability and begun frantic search and at least partial divestment in the tech stack for public services and key industries (e.g moving away from Windows to Linux on government computers).
Meanwhile, this Labour government has gone the opposite way by getting even more cosy with US tech. Specifically, Labour has intensified cooperation with Palantir in building a data analytics platform for the NHS (despite NHS workers opposing it, or that there are already homegrown solution that work way better) and in Defence (despite concern over national security due to passing confidential data, as Swiss army’s internal report concluded). Aside from that, Palantir is known for assisting Israel’s far-right government in committing countless war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, as well as receiving billions of dollars from the US government on defence contracts and returning the favour by providing software to ICE in order to target immigrants. Yet Palantir isn’t the only American company the Labour government attempts to court: they have also signed strategic partnership with OpenAI to find usage of their models in public services, such as outsourcing health inquiries and reviewing patients’ records for processing with their LLMs - which is private data - and is done so without patients’ consent.
Yet for European countries who began searching for methods to divest from American tech, the most preferable approach has also been a very simplistic one: replace it with Chinese big tech. We have already seen the signs of such approach: at least four heads of governments (Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sanchez, and, ironically, Keir Starmer too) have, one way or another, embraced closer cooperation with China - by proclaiming the “new world order”, offering joint ventures in the same way Chinese state did with Western companies since Deng Xiaoping, or in exchange for some preferential benefits that CCP has lobbied for a long time. In the UK's example, it’s been a trade deal in exchange for giving a green light to mega embassy construction in London - which, according to Tibetan, Hong Kong and Taiwanese democracy campaigners and refugees, endangers national security due to close proximity of fibre optic broadband cables that would allow it to intercept critical data, and threatens the very same democracy activists who are critical of CCP’s propaganda, smearing and spying campaigns. It even went as far as bribing UK immigration officer explicitly to target anti-CCP dissidents living in the United Kingdom as part of “shadow” Chinese police.
Even putting the concerns about spying and cozying up for economic relations, from the progressive perspective the attitude to replace American technology with Chinese will preserve foundational dependency except that it changes the figurine. While China smartly uses the opportunity to offer the EU and Canada a stable and predictable relationship based on mutual benefit, at the same time they want to retain a dominant role in manufacturing and supply chains. That’s why, for example, the CCP is deeply uncomfortable with even a proposal in the EU to decouple its key industries from Chinese manufacturers in order to boost its own manufacturing, and just recently they also imposed measures to prevent supply chains being moved out of China. I also find it ironic that some pundits who are sympathetic to the CCP suggest doing “joint ventures” with Chinese companies (it is the same approach Deng Xiaoping has introduced to boost Chinese manufacturing) because - surprise! - Chinese companies like BYD refuse to do that.
Therefore, instead of placating either Americans or Chinese in order to boost the economy and tech sector, it is time for European countries to embrace the strategy of digital sovereignty (or digital autonomy, as some people prefer) and cooperation between each other to offer an alternative option. We need a coherent economic and legislative approach to boost the growth of the tech industry in the UK, as well as massive investment in manufacturing (e.g semiconductor fabs) and infrastructure. Otherwise we’ll still have, among many examples, UK banks going offline because of the AWS US-East-1 server outage, or developing an over-reliance on Chinese-produced clean energy sources and components for manufacturing which may expose United Kingdom.
Fortunately, there are already specific plans that can be a good start. Recently, a report was published by non-profit organisation Open Rights Group (ORG) that makes a strong case for digital sovereignty by proposing reforms such as:
As a supporter of ORG, I’ve been working with them and contributing around the issues that have gone into this report. Having the opportunity, I’d like to express my gratitude to one of Mainstream Labour’s founding signatories Clive Lewis for writing a foreword to ORG’s report and recognising the importance of digital sovereignty.
Meanwhile, two pieces of tech policy proposals are worth paying attention to, both for the Labour Party and the government. Initially started as a petition and then adopted by the European Parliament, EU Inc. is designed as a set of corporate rules to ease the creation of tech startups, reduce the excessive bureaucracy, and attract more investment - all without compromising on employment laws or wages. Eurostack report addresses the challenges for achieving sovereignty of European digital infrastructure at each level of its stack - from semiconductor manufacturing to open source software development - and provides concrete policy proposals to address them. While one could argue that both of these proposals may have flaws in certain details, they can lay the foundation for a truly autonomous and self-reliant European tech industry. Even adopting at least some of the proposals as a part of closer alignment with the European Union will be a huge boost for the UK, especially with the Labour government steering the course towards closer alignment with the European Union.
But time is running out. This chance may easily be missed.
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Ilias is a digital privacy & tech policy activist born in Ukraine and resides in Manchester. Pirate with social democratic views, he campaigns for digital rights, copyright reform, open source, and using technology to make public services more accessible, and state to be more transparent. Beyond that, he works as an embedded engineer, occasionally writes for Ukrainian leftwing journal “Commons”, and campaigns for support of Ukrainian and Taiwanese resistance, as well as Hong Kongers and Uyghurs. You can find him on https://mstdn.social/@DM_Ronin
All blog posts represent the views of the author alone and not necessarily those of Mainstream.
