Two centuries ago, a director of the British East India Company offered a strikingly candid description of how empire worked. The Company’s system, he told Parliament, acted, “like a sponge, drawing up all the good things from the banks of the Ganges and squeezing them down on the banks of the Thames”. It was an unusually honest admission of how power flows through infrastructure. Control the system through which value moves, and the value – and the power – will follow.
History does not repeat itself neatly. But it rhymes. Today we would be foolish to ignore the echo.
The question the report Tech Giants and Giant Slayers: The Case For Digital Sovereignty & The Digital Commons addresses is simple but profound: who controls the infrastructure on which modern societies depend?
Cloud computing, data systems, artificial intelligence (AI), software platforms and algorithmic networks are no longer peripheral technologies. They are the operating system of modern states, economies and democracies. Yet the UK, like many countries, increasingly relies on a handful of global technology firms to build, operate and maintain them – firms that answer not to democratic institutions but to their shareholders and, in some cases, to foreign governments.
Tech Giants – a danger to society?
For some time I have been concerned about the direction of travel. We are witnessing a structural shift in the balance of power between states and large technology corporations. Critical infrastructure that once sat within democratic oversight is now increasingly mediated through private platforms and proprietary systems. The implications for sovereignty, accountability and economic resilience are serious.
The report identifies several connected dangers.
The first is corporate capture of state infrastructure: when essential systems are designed, owned and operated by private actors, the state’s ability to shape its own policy environment narrows.
The second is dependency on oligopolies, where vendor lock-in, proprietary standards and network effects trap governments within commercial ecosystems even when the costs – financial or strategic – become hard to justify.
The third is the question of democratic control of systems that are not politically neutral. Decisions about how infrastructure operates, what it prioritises and how it evolves have political and social consequences, whether or not they are made through political processes.
The fourth danger is perhaps the deepest. Data and algorithms do not merely power economic activity. They increasingly mediate how citizens encounter information, interpret events and form political opinions. The systems that curate what we read and watch now have the power to shape public debate itself. We have already seen how foreign-owned platforms can promote, suppress or algorithmically amplify particular viewpoints – sometimes reflecting the preferences of their owners. Control over digital infrastructure therefore extends beyond markets and innovation into something more fundamental: who shapes the public sphere, and on whose terms?
This is the digital equivalent of what some of us are calling ‘the privatisation premium’.
When essential services are privatised, households and businesses typically end up paying more for infrastructure that once existed to serve the public interest. Water, energy, rail and housing have all shown how private ownership of natural monopolies produces higher costs, reduced accountability and systemic extraction. In the digital realm the same dynamic is at work – but the cost is not simply financial. Those who control data and the systems built on it can extract value from it, train the algorithms that define future markets and capture the economic returns that follow. Control of infrastructure today means control of innovation tomorrow.
To be a Giant Slayer – that is the political challenge
The report points towards solutions, among them the revival of a principle Britain once understood well: that certain forms of infrastructure are too important to be left entirely to market forces.
The creation of the BBC offers a useful precedent. When broadcasting emerged in the early twentieth century, Britain faced a choice between the American model – private corporations dominant, commercial incentives paramount – and a public institution designed to serve the public interest. Under John Reith, Britain chose the latter.
Reith warned in 1924 against allowing private corporations to dominate communications networks, and insisted that broadcasting should operate within a framework of democratic accountability. The institution that resulted has lasted a century.
As the BBC approaches its next Charter renewal, that choice presents itself again in a new form. This is not merely a debate about broadcasting. It is a moment to consider the broader role public institutions can play in the digital public sphere – whether a renewed BBC, embedded within a wider ecosystem of open technologies and publicly accountable infrastructure, could help anchor a genuinely public digital commons.
The challenge is not technical. It is political. It concerns the shape of power in the twenty-first century, and whether democratic institutions retain the capacity to exercise it.
The East India Company director who described his enterprise as a sponge was at least honest about what he was doing. The question before us is whether, two hundred years later, we are equally clear-eyed about what is happening – and whether we retain the will to respond.
This is Clive Lewis’ forward to the report ‘Tech Giants and Giant Slayers: The Case For Digital Sovereignty & The Digital Commons’ by the Open Rights Group and is reproduced with permission.
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