Blancato, FG;
Carr, M;
(2024)
The trust deficit. EU bargaining for access and control over cloud infrastructures.
Journal of European Public Policy
10.1080/13501763.2024.2441418.
(In press).
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Abstract
European Union (EU) governments rely on a handful of American cloud providers (hyperscalers) for critical state functions, which creates strategic dependencies. The EU data sovereignty agenda aims to manage such dependence, yet hyperscalers criticise it for excluding leading industry players from the EU market and slowing economic growth. In this paper, we argue that sovereignty policies in the cloud are the result of a trust deficit between European governments and American hyperscalers. The trust deficit consists of a continuous bargain by European governments for greater access and control over hyperscalers’ infrastructures. Hyperscalers, in turn, respond to such demands mainly through technology. But is their response sufficient to address the trust deficit? Drawing from technical documents and expert interviews, we find that states and hyperscalers have a fundamentally different understanding of sovereignty; that technology alone cannot address the trust deficit; and that data sovereignty policies in the cloud can be compatible with the digital economy and cybersecurity. Our study is a starting point for further research on the political economy of trust in the governance of digital technologies.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The trust deficit. EU bargaining for access and control over cloud infrastructures |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/13501763.2024.2441418 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2024.2441418 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Cloud computing, European Union, trust, data sovereignty, digital sovereignty |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10203007 |
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