Sovereignty for sale

Tech monopolies and the future of the nation state

Elon Musk’s decision to block Russia from using Starlink satellites has proved a serious setback for Moscow; hampering troops’ use of drones and artillery. Putin’s reliance on tech controlled by a foreign company has left him badly exposed.

The Ukrainians have had their own issues with Starlink. Musk provided thousands of terminals in the first days of the war, after Russia blocked access to the Viasat satellite communications systems. But since then he’s limited Ukraine’s ability to use it to attack Russian territory; starting after he spoke to Putin in autumn 2022.

Musk’s ability to change the course of the conflict raises questions that go far beyond Ukraine. Private businesses have a long history of participating in wars, and providing public services, as contractors and suppliers. But the power that major tech companies have over nation states is something new.¹

Even the US is dependent on Musk’s SpaceX, which now controls two thirds of all global low earth orbit satellites, and performs the majority of the world’s annual orbital launches. NASA needs its rockets for resupplying the International Space Station, and Starlink is increasingly integrated into military equipment (as we’ve seen in Iran).

For the Americans the risk is in exposure to a single point of failure rather than sovereignty. SpaceX is a US company and, in extremis, the government can force it to comply via regulation or economic threat (as they are currently trying to do with Anthropic over its insistence on retaining control over the use of its AI tools).² For other countries, though, reliance on foreign companies is a serious threat to independence, as Russia and Ukraine have found.

The risk goes well beyond SpaceX. Tech firms are integrated into military and governmental systems worldwide; as fundamental to the functioning of societies as water or electricity. Trump’s increasing disdain for allies has pushed this issue up the agenda in Europe, where debates about “tech sovereignty” are increasingly heated. In the UK we are particularly exposed. Governments here have blocked Chinese companies from providing critical infrastructure but to date have been less worried about reliance on US firms, and indeed are continuing to court them in their search for economic growth.³ But the problem is becoming hard to ignore.

So in the rest of this post I’ll look at the key vulnerabilities created by state dependence on tech companies in the UK and how other governments are starting to mitigate these. I’ll finish with some thoughts on steps we should be taking.

UK exposure

In Britain, Palantir is the company most often identified with sovereignty risks due to its increasingly prominent role in managing data for the NHS, military and police. Its leadership is also openly political, with close ties to the Trump administration, making the danger more obvious. ICE’s use of Palantir technology for its brutal crackdowns in American cities, while CEO Alex Karp makes ever more alarming public statements, hasn’t helped.⁴