Sovereignty. The Geography of the Cloud
When territory became infrastructure
There is something rather misleading about the word “cloud”. It sounds weightless. Something floating somewhere above us. Abstract, distributed, almost placeless.
Of course, it isn't. The cloud is made of buildings, cables, chips, electricity, cooling systems, people, contracts, companies and laws. Lots of laws. And all of those things have a location. This matters because we have spent the last decade talking about digital services as if geography had become almost irrelevant.
Data is “in the cloud” and our meetings are “in the cloud”. Our applications are “in the cloud” and our documents are “in the cloud”. Perhaps sovereignty is also supposed to be somewhere up there.
But sovereignty has a rather annoying habit of coming back down to Earth.
The data is somewhere
When people talk about data sovereignty, one of the first questions is usually Where is the data?It is a perfectly reasonable...
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