Every Data Centre Is a US Military Base

In February 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order sanctioning the International Criminal Court and its chief prosecutor, British lawyer Karim Khan. The move came in response to the court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity in the Gaza genocide.

The move was outrageous for many reasons, and was not even the first time the United States had sanctioned an International Criminal Court chief prosecutor. Khan’s predecessor was also in Trump’s crosshairs when she opened an investigation into crimes in Afghanistan, where the actions of the United States would not be excluded.

The sanctions on Khan hampered the work of the court. Not only were his U.K. bank accounts frozen, but he also lost access to his Microsoft email address. He ended up switching to Swiss privacy-focused provider Proton Mail. While it has not made the same impact in Canada, the news about Khan losing his access to Microsoft services quickly rippled through the halls of power across Europe when it was revealed in May 2025.

The withdrawal of service showed European lawmakers how vulnerable their access is to the technologies they rely on not just in their personal lives, but to run governments and key institutions. They were also facing escalating pressure from the Trump administration and the billionaires of Silicon Valley to roll back their world-leading tech regulations, and U.S. Vice-President JD Vance showed up on the continent a week after Khan was sanctioned to lecture Europe about its values, approach to free speech and attempts to exclude the extreme-right party Alternative for Germany from political power.

Microsoft tried to distance itself from the controversy, but even its spokesperson admitted there had been a “disconnection of [the court’s] sanctioned official.”

The company didn’t help its case when Microsoft France’s director of public and legal affairs told the French Senate under oath in June that it “cannot guarantee” it would be able to deny requests from the Trump administration for data stored on its servers within the European Union.

As European lawmakers grew increasingly concerned about a U.S. digital “kill switch” and the security of the cloud services supplied by major U.S. companies, one thing was clear: they were not nearly as sovereign as they previously believed, and their dependence on U.S. tech had to be addressed.

Rolling back tech regulation

Canada is not immune from these vulnerabilities. Due to our geographic proximity to and greater dependence on the United States, they are arguably even more present as Canadians reassess our relationship with our neighbour to the south. We have already seen how effectively the United States can apply pressure to Canada in the tech domain and beyond.

If we look at Europe, the pressure from U.S. tech executives like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg or Apple CEO Tim Cook is much more apparent. The chief executives and company spokespeople regularly single out European regulations, complaining they cause them commercial headaches. In Canada, that pressure is still there; the executives just don’t often speak out publicly. The more vocal opposition is outsourced to domestic tech leaders and our own coterie of commentators who echo narratives beneficial to the big U.S. tech giants.

Over the past couple of years we saw a concerted campaign by Canadian tech executives, aligned with the right-wing politics their counterparts in Silicon Valley adopted, begin to push a political program in their interests, often paired with explicit support for Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada.

However, since Mark Carney replaced Justin Trudeau at the helm of the Liberal party, they’ve embraced the central-banker-in-chief. He’s committed to attracting investment above all else, and that means he’s much more open to their policy demands.

As a result, we’ve seen a rapid erosion in the government’s efforts to rein in U.S. tech companies. Shortly after Carney became prime minister, planned AI regulations were put on ice, along with the online harms bill that sought to address harmful behaviour in online spaces. That was in spite of concretely seeing how those platforms are used by bad actors to sow division within society as wildfires spread across the country again last summer. In parts of the country, local politicians had to directly respond to disinformation spreading online that people desperate for updates were falling for.

Last June, another pillar in the Trudeau government’s attempt to regulate the tech industry fell when Trump walked away from trade negotiations, saying he would return only once the Canadian government repealed its digital services tax. Executives like Zuckerberg have lobbied Trump to try to kill those taxes in countries around the world. Late on the Sunday night before the tax was supposed to come into effect, Carney and Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced it would be sacrificed so talks could continue. Months later, a comprehensive deal with the United States remains elusive.

It can be easy to believe that all this pressure is a product of the way Trump’s return to office emboldened U.S. tech companies, but it’s simply brought a long-standing process out into the open. The U.S. government has long recognized how much it benefits from ensuring other countries are dependent on products and services made by companies in its jurisdiction. For years, it used trade negotiations to insert clauses in agreements that limit foreign governments’ ability to regulate its tech companies and has used its diplomats to apply pressure in other ways.

For example, the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement contains measures that constrain the authority of the Canadian government to regulate the tech industry. The agreement limits the ability to regulate cross-border data flows, to force companies to reveal their source code, to discriminate between foreign and domestic tech firms or to expect them to store data on Canadians within our borders.

On top of that, U.S. officials under the Joe Biden administration regularly pressured the government when it moved forward with tech regulations, including with the streaming bill and digital services tax.

The Online News Act is the latest to find itself in U.S. crosshairs.

Protecting the global market share and curtailing attempts to rein in U.S. tech companies is bipartisan policy in the United States. They may occasionally get angry at certain domestic consequences of the tech products they depend on, but Democrats and Republicans alike are not very concerned about how those issues play out beyond the country’s borders. Ensuring other countries depend on U.S. tech companies not only increases U.S. power, but also provides it with ample economic benefits.

The consequences of dependence

Political developments in the 1980s and 1990s played a key role in shaping the dominant position the United States holds today. In the late 1980s, then-senator Al Gore recognized that technology and power were inseparable. In a speech to the U.S. Senate, he declared that “the nation which most completely assimilates high-performance computing into its economy will very likely emerge as the dominant intellectual, economic and technological force in the next century.”

Gore and President Bill Clinton were intent on ensuring the United States reaped the gains of the emerging internet. What started as a military and academic project had already begun to be commercialized, and in 1995 they completed the handover of the public infrastructure to the private sector. U.S. companies got a head start on building the businesses that would dominate the digital economy, and much easier access to capital to rapidly scale domestically and later internationally.

In those years, the model of the internet was established — and the private sector was firmly in charge. There were debates about carving out a “public lane” on the “information superhighway,” but those efforts were ultimately defeated.

The U.S. government used its influence to push for telecom deregulation and the removal of trade barriers around the world, aiding its companies to move into international markets. Tech advocacy groups assisted in their own way by crafting a narrative that the internet was inherently liberatory and any attempts by governments to restrict the expansion of digital services, platforms and the companies that run them was an inherent breach of their citizens’ rights.

Over time, U.S. companies rode the wave to global dominance, and as they took over new markets, domestic competitors were acquired or simply failed in the face of the pressure.

Our dependence on U.S. tech has long been a problem, just one that many people in power did not want to touch because of how it would anger the United States. Even proposing basic tech regulations prompted rebukes from the U.S. government and threatened the prospect of investment from those digital colonizers. But that dependence left us without the tools to get a handle on key avenues for communication and commerce.

As U.S. tech companies fought to roll back workers’ rights in the gig economy and beyond, allowed false information to spread across social media platforms, decimated the funding model for journalism and had countless other negative social impacts, the Canadian government was limited in its ability to respond.

All the while, as more Canadians — both individuals and companies — became dependent on U.S. digital services, the profits were siphoned back to the United States, fuelling a growing economic divide that has prompted economists to start sounding the alarm.

Reclaiming digital sovereignty

There is one thing we can say for Trump’s attacks on Canada: they have finally given us the space to speak openly and honestly about many of the ways the U.S.-Canada relationship has not been working for us for a very long time — and the digital dimension of our lopsided economic integration is a massive part of that.

If Canada is to regain greater autonomy over its affairs and build a better society, we must get serious about reclaiming our digital sovereignty.

Since Trump’s return to office, governments have been ramping up defence spending to ensure they can defend themselves in a world where the United States is no longer a security guarantor and is possibly even a security threat. That same seriousness should be given to digital technology.

As our European allies have found first-hand, our dependence on U.S. companies for cloud services creates a severe vulnerability, where the U.S. government can request whatever data it wants or can even shut off our access at a moment’s notice.

During the federal election campaign, Carney said he would be reassessing public cloud contracts going to Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle. More recently, when he announced the first batch of nation-building projects, the prime minister called out the need for a sovereign cloud. He is taking steps in the right direction, but the devil will be in the details.

Our ambition cannot stop there, though. In far too many cases, our governments, universities, schools and other public institutions — not to mention private businesses — are run on Microsoft or Google services. Now is the perfect time to get governments off Microsoft 365 and schools off Google Classroom by properly resourcing a new public agency or Crown corporation dedicated to building technology in the public interest.

European state, local and even departments of national governments are already taking the initiative to move in that direction. There are ample open-source tools already out there that could be adapted to those institutional use cases, with a mandate to work in close collaboration with public institutions to ensure their new suite of digital services properly meets their unique needs. Governments could even think about bringing tech development closer to communities, building on a model not dissimilar to public libraries.

We have an opportunity to think bigger and to challenge those fundamental assumptions that were crafted in the 1990s to convince us digital technology had to be left to the private sector.

For three decades, the goal of tech development has been not to improve our lives or to serve the public good, but rather to maximize shareholder value and to increase the power of the companies that control it.

It’s that nature of digital technology that is at the root of so many of the social harms the tech oligopoly has saddled us with in recent years. We need to recognize that was a choice, and we can choose to take a different path.

But we must also be aware of the pitfalls ahead. Some Canadian tech executives who, until recently, were pushing for a Conservative government are embracing a program of digital sovereignty as well, but it is explicitly not one that centres the public good.

Instead, they’re pushing the government to continue pulling back on regulations, while deploying billions through public procurement, incentives and subsidies to flood into their businesses. They want to hold on to the Silicon Valley model and the harms it has created, but better cash in on it for themselves. They want to join the digital colonizers rather than bring them down.