To build systems that are genuinely digital, public and infrastructural -- and recognizing the range of motivations for such systems -- the piece calls for an expanded conversation about the designs and goals of digital public infrastructures.

Read it here: openfuture.eu/publication/...

What's more, the hegemonic understanding doesn't account for the real-world range of systems that are digital, public and infrastructural. As it's localized around the world today in practice the concept encompasses a range of issues from sovereignty to cloud capabilities to democratic public space.

DPI has been promoted both through abstract universal technocratic definitions and specific Indian-influenced examples of digital ID, payments and data exchanges. Yet this hegemonic version has critical blindspots: it excludes hardware, social infrastructures and democratic governance.

The conversation about digital sovereignty needs to address political capture by local elites. The broad policy programme that the report calls for must go hand in hand with a political programme that builds progressive social forces against oligarchy.

The biggest beneficiaries of India's state-promoted DPI have been a surveillant state apparatus and elite capitalists, not the people. Digital sovereignty for local oligarchs instead of US or Chinese ones.

If it bypasses the people, digital sovereignty risks leading to what has happened in India over the past decade: A retrograde alliance between the state and domestic capital that has excluded the vast majority of Indians with disastrous results.

We can't assume this is the case. After decades of neoliberalism, these forces have been systematically weakened (of course, Big Tech has had a role to play here). This is a key issue of our times.

What are those conditions? Most importantly, strong people's movements, grassroots associations, civil society and unions to lead the state and hold it to account. "People and the planet" need to be organized to fight for themselves!

But there's a barely qualified assumption here that increased state sovereignty will empower people and the planet. That's only true under certain conditions.

A central claim -- one that is gaining traction around the world -- is that states are the only forces capable of countering the power of Big Tech. Which is true.