But if we really want to have this infrastructure operating as the water pipes, this needs to be provided as a public service, needs to be a public utility.

And for many countries in the world, I think that it's interesting to think of international solutions.

Music Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and Happy New Year.

We don't have a new episode this week.

We have another premium episode from our Data Vampire series that is being made public for all of you to listen to while I take a little break over the holidays.

This week's episode is with Cecilia Rickap, Associate Professor in Economics at University College London.

Since recording this conversation, Cecilia and I have actually been co-authors on a white paper

calling for digital sovereignty for governments to reclaim their digital sovereignty and laying

out kind of like a policy program for how that might be pursued. I'll include the link in the

show notes if you want to check it out. But in this episode, we talked about a report that Cecilia authored that looked at how companies exert their power through AI and through the cloud. And I thought that there were a lot of really important insights in this conversation. Some of them were included in the Data Vampires series, of course, but some of them were not.

And so I figured this conversation paired well with the one last week with Ali al-Katib looking into the politics of AI more generally.

And this looks at the corporate power surrounding AI and how these companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, are able to exert and enhance their power through something

like the AI boom that we have seen over the past couple years, but also this larger push

to have all these companies using cloud infrastructure and cloud computing that is often owned

and controlled by one of these three major tech giants. So I think that this is a really

insightful conversation. I hope that you

enjoy it before we get back to your regularly scheduled episodes next week. But I think that this

will be an insightful one if you still want something to listen to over the holidays. So if you

enjoy this episode, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also

share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do

want to support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week and to get

...