In my recent post on Privacy → Security → Sovereignty, I argued that the next decade of digital life will hinge not on how well we hide or encrypt our data, but on how much control we retain over our identity, presence, and relationships online.
A thoughtful reader pushed back on one part of that argument. Specifically, my metaphor is that Big Tech platforms act as “landlords” of our digital lives. They asked:
“Aren’t we all still tenants? Even if we self-host or own our own domains, we still rely on ISPs, power companies, cloud hosts, and other external services. Doesn’t that mean sovereignty is impossible?”
This is a sharp, important critique. It exposes what I call the Turtles All the Way Down Trap. The idea that unless you control every layer of the stack, sovereignty is an illusion. And if sovereignty is impossible, why even bother?
But this is the wrong way to think about it.
The question isn’t “Can I sever all dependencies?”
The question is “Which dependencies matter for agency?”
And in that distinction lies the entire concept of Digital Sovereignty.
The Utility vs. The Landlord
To understand sovereignty, we must separate the two layers of the digital world that most people collapse:
1. The Utility (Infrastructure Layer)
Your ISP (Internet Service Provider). Your cloud host. The power company. These are infrastructure providers. The digital equivalent of electricity or water.
They give you raw resources:
- bandwidth
- storage
- compute
- power
And crucially: they don’t care what you do with it, as long as you pay your bill and follow the law.
Utilities do not:
- decide what content you publish
- choose who sees your work
- manipulate your audience
- delete your account because of your politics
- make your history disappear
They provide the pipes. They don’t decorate your house.
2. The Landlord (Platform Layer)
Social media silos, proprietary publishing tools, algorithmic feeds.
Platforms behave like landlords:
- they determine visibility
- they control monetization
- they moderate identity
- they mediate community norms
- they can delete you and your history on a whim
And the more you depend on them, the more power they hold over your digital life.
Digital Sovereignty isn’t about controlling utilities. It’s about refusing to live under digital landlords.
Why This Distinction Matters Now
The “everything is a dependency” critique becomes a form of fatalism:
- “If I can’t run my own fiber, why bother?”
- “If AWS (Amazon Web Services) hosts my site, how sovereign can I be?”
- “If a cloud company can unplug me, isn’t it the same as Facebook?”
But the logic here collapses two fundamentally different types of power.
A utility can cut you off only through due process, policy, or payment issues. A platform can cut you off because someone flagged a post.
A utility provides infrastructure. A platform governs identity.
And that difference is everything.
Pragmatic Digital Sovereignty
Sovereignty isn’t about doing everything yourself. It’s about keeping control over the things that matter.
Think of it like this:
Owning your domain → Sovereignty
Using DigitalOcean or Netlify to host it → Utility
Only posting on Facebook or TikTok → Landlord territory
Owning your email address → Sovereignty
Using standard email protocols, you didn’t build → Utility
Living inside Instagram DMs → Landlord territory
Running your own site or digital garden → Sovereignty
Paying a cloud provider for hosting → Utility
Publishing only on Substack → Landlord territory
Sovereignty means you hold the keys.
Utilities help you run the place.
Landlords decide what’s allowed and can evict you at any time.
Sovereignty Includes Ethical Choice
Digital sovereignty isn’t only about bits and bytes. It’s also about judgment. Platforms and landlords aren’t neutral: they have rules, cultures, and values.
Owning your domain and data gives you the freedom to act if your landlord’s ethos changes. If a platform becomes toxic, exploitative, or oppressive (or, in the extreme, embraces hateful ideologies), you can leave without losing your community or your work.
Sovereignty means:
- You choose where to live online, not just how.
- You aren’t trapped by the whims, ethics, or agendas of a single company.
- Your loyalty is to your principles and your audience, not to a feed or algorithm.
In short, sovereignty protects your agency in both technical and moral dimensions.
The Work Ahead: Civic Sovereignty
This distinction matters not just for technologists. It matters for communities.
If citizens, educators, journalists, and creators want a healthier public sphere, we need to build toward:
- portable identities
- portable audiences
- portable archives
- portable workflows
That’s Civic Sovereignty. Agency that scales from individuals → communities → institutions.
And you can practice it right now.
Not by rebuilding the internet. Not by smelting your own silicon.
But by refusing to hand the keys to your digital life to a platform that doesn’t care about you.
Sovereignty isn’t purity. It’s control.
Even if you still pay the electric bill.