Mobile phone with earth display background design (Getty Images Plus)

This debate is not purely normative: it is also about competitive advantage and technological leadership (Getty Images Plus)

The data sovereignty fault line dividing Washington and its allies

The US wants open data flows, but its fractured digital governance at home makes that argument hard to sell.

Alana Ford

27 February 20264 min read

For nearly three decades, the digital economy has operated on a US-designed model of cross-border data flows, platform immunity and innovation at scale. This model is under increasing strain. In a recent cable, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed US diplomats to actively push back against foreign data sovereignty initiatives, describing aspects of the EU’s regulation as “unnecessarily burdensome” and harmful to innovation and civil liberties.

Meanwhile, France recently announced it would replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom across its government systems with Visio, a domestically controlled platform, citing security concerns and a broader push for digital autonomy. That move sits within a wider EU trajectory – from sovereign cloud initiatives to industrial data strategies – aimed at reducing dependence on non-European providers for sensitive public sector systems.

Taken together, these moves illustrate a growing fault line among allies over who controls the global digital infrastructure and how it is governed.

On the surface, Washington’s case is evident. Data localisation, it argues, fragments the global internet, increases compliance costs for tech companies, disrupts cross-border data flows, weakens artificial intelligence development, and risks empowering governments to censor online speech.

This argument is reductive.

Across the international system, sovereignty is increasingly applied on a risk-tiered basis, prioritising government communications, defence systems, critical infrastructure and national security datasets for sovereign hosting and stricter jurisdictional control. This is not wholesale digital decoupling. It is a recalibration of control in areas where exposure carries strategic consequences.

Washington is diplomatically defending a digital governance model that remains unsettled and politically charged at home.

That recalibration is being shaped by today’s extraordinary geopolitical volatility. In an era of sanctions regimes, supply-chain weaponisation and the “rupturing” of the rules-based order, dependence on foreign hyperscalers is no longer a neutral commercial choice. It is a strategic variable. Governments are asking uncomfortable but rational questions: What happens in a crisis? How secure is data if the legal jurisdiction resides elsewhere? How exposed are public systems to foreign political pressure?

As such, the reported tension between Washington and Paris is not really about server location. It is about competing lenses. The US frames the debate in normative terms – openness, innovation, civil liberties and a free internet. Others, however, increasingly view it through a strategic and industrial lens centred on resilience, autonomy and long-term technological capacity.

Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act enabled the growth of the ad-driven, data-intensive platform model that underpins today’s hyperscalers and the AI ecosystem. Successive administrations have treated open data flows as both an economic and strategic asset.

In that sense, the State Department’s current posture is not new. It reflects a longstanding US doctrine: openness fuels innovation, and innovation underwrites national power.

What complicates the picture is domestic instability. Congress has repeatedly failed to agree on comprehensive federal privacy legislation. Courts and state legislatures continue to test contradictory approaches to platform liability and moderation. Content governance and “censorship” have become deeply politicised. In short, Washington is diplomatically defending a digital governance model that remains unsettled and politically charged at home.

This matters for credibility. When US officials warn that localisation may enable censorship, that concern is legitimate because many foreign governments do use digital sovereignty to entrench surveillance and suppress dissent. But allies also see a US framework that lacks comprehensive privacy protections and struggles to articulate a stable position on platform governance. That weakens the moral clarity of the American critique.

Industrial strategy further sharpens the divide. The US is home to the world’s dominant cloud providers and many of the world’s leading AI firms. These companies benefit from global scale and unrestricted data flows. Diplomatic advocacy for openness aligns, at least in part, with American commercial interests. That does not invalidate Washington’s concerns about fragmentation, but it does underscore that this debate is not purely normative. It is also about competitive advantage and technological leadership.

For many European policymakers, sovereignty is not only about security but also about nurturing domestic digital ecosystems and diversifying markets. For parts of the Global South, it is about avoiding a digital economy in which data is extracted locally while value accrues elsewhere. Sovereignty, in these contexts, is industrial policy as much as regulatory doctrine.

Another core trade-off is resilience versus interoperability. Sovereign control can enhance crisis resilience and reduce strategic exposure. But it can also complicate interoperability among allies whose defence, intelligence and commercial systems are deeply integrated. That trade-off is operational, not theoretical.

Australia sits squarely within this dilemma. As a close US ally, it depends on trusted cross-border data flows and interoperable systems. Yet it also faces legitimate questions about resilience, foreign interference and the adequacy of its privacy architecture. Absolute digital openness is politically untenable in a world of strategic competition, yet blanket localisation would be economically inefficient and technologically regressive.

Ultimately, this dispute is about who writes the rules for the digital age, and whether that rule-making is grounded in openness, autonomy, or a negotiated balance of both. A sustainable digital order will require more than defending established doctrines. It will require reconciling sovereignty with trust, resilience with interoperability, and industrial ambition with credible rights protections.

About the author

Alana Ford

Alana Ford is the Founder & Principal Adviser at Sirius Geopolitics .

Topics

Cyber & technology