Digital Sovereignty Is in the Fine Print

Gabriela Ramos (with Emilija Stojmenova Duh) | 21 September 2026

Background

For the last decade, the global debate around digital sovereignty has been fought on a geopolitical and corporate chessboard. We talk about it in terms of data centers, indigenous cloud infrastructure, semiconductor supply chains, and the immense monopoly power of Big Tech.

But this heavy, state-and-infrastructure-centric focus misses the ultimate stakeholder: the citizen.

If a democratic state surrenders its digital infrastructure to an oligopoly of foreign private firms, it hasn't just lost economic autonomy. It has outsourced the very architecture of its citizens' rights, public welfare, and democratic choices. True digital sovereignty cannot merely be about where servers sit or who writes the procurement contracts; it must be about citizenship sovereignty.

The Provocation

We have allowed the digital public square to be privatized by default. Today, a citizen’s relationship with their government—from accessing healthcare and welfare to participating in civic discourse—is mediated by proprietary, black-box artificial intelligence and corporate platforms.

When algorithmic systems dictate who gets a housing loan, how public safety is managed, or how information flows during an election, private corporate interests quietly rewrite the social contract. The fine print of technology procurement contracts isn't just bureaucratic legalism; it is the frontline where modern constitutional rights are either protected or traded away. Unfortunately, not enough attention is being paid to this. While the discourse around digital sovereignty gathers pace, the very arrangements being adopted to run government services are entrenching dependencies that will be difficult to reverse.

If AI and digital technologies are to serve a genuine social purpose, we must stop treating citizens as passive consumers of tech infrastructure. We must transition from an era of extractive data capitalism to an era of digital public goods, where open standards, algorithmic transparency, and data self-determination are non-negotiable prerequisites for public engagement.

If a government cannot explain, audit, or alter the digital systems that govern its people, then that government is no longer fully sovereign—and its citizens are no longer fully free.

The good news is that governments have leverage. Policymakers must overhaul how they negotiate with tech firms and regard contracts as instruments of public law that specify data residency in enforceable terms, prohibit further transfer, require operational continuity, mandate portable exit and impose meaningful penalties when these terms are breached. They could also rely on conditionality in their public procurement arrangements to shape the interaction with service providers, and they could also form alliances from other countries that are also consumers of these same goods.

The Questions for the 40 Global Respondents

To help us shape the agenda for the upcoming Working Group on AI and Digital for Social Purpose, we invite you to respond to this provocation by addressing one or more of the following questions:

1. The Sovereignty Paradox: How can smaller or developing nations realistically assert digital sovereignty and protect citizen rights when they lack the capital to build domestic alternatives to global Big Tech infrastructure?

2. The Red Lines of Public AI: What specific public services or democratic functions should never be outsourced to proprietary, black-box AI models, regardless of how efficient or cost-effective they claim to be?

3. The New Social Contract: What institutional mechanisms or international standards do we need to ensure that data generated by the public is treated as a shared public good rather than private corporate property? How do we maintain accountability and transparency in public decision making if non transparent AI models and agents are integrated in government processes?

4. Government’s leverages. What government policy instruments provide leverage when entering into contractual relationships with Big tech?

5. The New Urban Social Contract: What institutional mechanisms do we need to ensure that the massive environmental and civic data generated by cities is treated as a shared public good rather than private corporate property?