The capture of our public infrastructure by private behemoths

By Martin Blanchard, August 2025

The UK government’s ‘Cloud First’ policy is resulting in the use of US big tech (including Microsoft, Google, AWS, Apple and Oracle) digital infrastructure aka ‘public cloud’ across public services including the NHS, where its use has been made central to any successful attempt at improved productivity in the NHS 10 Year Plan.

However, the development and deployment of big tech cloud services has included the global theft of population personal data and science knowledge from public institutions; huge harms to the environment and abuse of human rights, and direct destruction of human life through its use as a military and surveillance asset for the US and allied governments including in the Gaza genocide.

As far as the technology involved is concerned, with the help of trillion dollar investors, big tech has created monopolies in knowledge and compute to reach and remain at the cutting edge of cloud services and become the default infrastructure on which to train generative AI, and perform large database analytics.

Unlike machines of the past, generative AI improves in its performance as it works on data; so, when big tech offer AI as a service on their cloud for a cost, they also benefit from the improvement of their algorithms and their potential value, and the reinforcement of their intellectual monopolies.

From an economic perspective, big tech’s profit gathering is unique. Instead of generating surplus value through capital investment where there are lower costs and high demand, big tech invests to bring different areas of societal activity under its control.

It ensnares individuals, businesses and institutions because its services are not commodities as such, they are ‘critical infrastructures’ on which society depends, allowing them as monopolists to charge exorbitant rents and to generate endless flows of monetizable data.

Big tech has been firmly placed at the heart of our government and also in other areas of our public services to ‘improve productivity’. Its cloud infrastructure has been designed to create and extract enormous amounts of surplus value from the innovations created on it, and the ongoing solutions it provides. The interventions developed by big tech for services provided by humans will be those of ‘solutionists’ eschewing investment in more fully trained people in order to reduce costs.¹

Recent requests from the Trump administration for big tech to render US government ‘more modern and productive’ have increased their influence and will empower all private interests further at the expense of public institutions in the US and abroad. The new data and knowledge solely acquired by big tech will allow them, as political theorist Cédric Durand explains, to begin to centralise ‘the algorithmic means of coordination of all public activities’. As public institutions are rendered incapable of organising society’s needs, the task will then fall to big tech with all the power that brings.

To take this to its potential conclusion, as Durand states: ‘The public sphere dissolves into online networks….and AI colonizes what Marx called the ‘general intellect’² heralding the inevitable appropriation of political power by private interests and corporations’. Durand expands this argument in his work Technofudalism³.

These encroachments into public services must be seen for what they are: tech-based ‘colonial’ primitive accumulation and we must reject them if we are to maintain ourselves as a separate, sovereign state as others are trying – sometimes together – to do (for example: an International call for Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty, developing European proposals, concerns from Denmark, and ongoing negotiations across Latin America).

References:

Examples of how big tech once it enters our public services can exert power for its solutions can be read at Chatham House and heard in an interview of Seda Gürses, a critical computer scientist, by Arun Kundnani of TNI.
Marx K. Grundrisse: Foundation of the Critique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Classic in Association with the NLR 1993) pp 702-741
Durand, C. How silicon valley unleashed techno-feudalism: the making of the digital economy. Trans by D. Broder Verso 2024 (First published as Technofeudalism: Critique de l’économie numérique. Éditions La Découverte 2020)

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