The challenge of the cloud: between transnational capitalism and data sovereignty

ABSTRACT

The rise of transnational cloud platforms poses challenges to cross-border data governance, an understudied area in mainstream global Internet governance studies. Another gap is a critical political economy approach that contributes to a more historical, contextual and dialectical understanding of policy frameworks and their enacting actors, the state. Filling these gaps, this article uses the cloud computing development in China as an example to unpack the geopolitics of the cloud and tensions in data governance models. It argues that the state, neither obsolete nor irrelevant, is the core architect of the varying approaches that reflect the changing dynamics in information geopolitics.

KEYWORDS:

• Geopolitics of the cloud
• Internet governance
• transnational digital capitalism
• data sovereignty

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Professor Dan Schiller and all three guest editors of the special issue for their criticisms, suggestions and helps with this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Min Tang

Min Tang is an Associate Teaching Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington Bothell. She holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A critical political economy scholar, Dr. Tang studies how capitalist relations and power structures shape the provision system of communication and information in our society. She is the author of Tencent: The Political Economy of China’s Surging Internet Giant (Routledge, 2019). Her work can also be found on peer-reviewed journals including Chinese Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, and Information, Communication & Society. Recently she has been researching the increasing complexity in global geopolitics around the information infrastructures.