Starlink, the Cloud, and Corporate Dependency

The Trump Administration has repeatedly pushed for the adoption or licensing of Elon Musk’s satellite company Starlink in trade negotiations. But as Musk’s strategic use of his satellite service reveals, corporate control over critical infrastructure inevitably translates into political power. Power that companies may wield in alignment with, or in opposition to, state interests.

The solution, however, may not lie in stronger state oversight alone, but in democratizing corporations themselves.

The Starlink incident and state-corporate relations

In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the degradation of its communications infrastructure, Elon Musk offered his Starlink satellite services to the Ukrainian government and public, free of charge. In the middle of a planned attack against Russian forces in 2022, however, the SpaceX CEO disabled Starlink access in a geofenced area to thwart the attack, forcing Ukrainian armed forces to retreat as their communications malfunctioned. He even tweeted that he had spoken directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin about a peace plan. The incident showed that while we are not used to thinking of corporations as political actors, or satellite company CEOs as negotiators of international war, companies and businessmen clearly have a form of political power.

After the Ukraine incident, it is perhaps understandable that other countries have been somewhat wary of inking deals with Starlink. In response, the US appeared to throw its incredible might behind the company. Leaked State Department documents showed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed officials to demand regulatory approvals for satellite services during trade talks, often mentioning Starlink by name. One such case: after President Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Lesotho, the country approved the first ever satellite internet service license to Starlink.

While part of this may be due to the previous alliance between Trump and Musk, it also reflects how useful it is for the US government when American companies control global critical infrastructure upon which other states might depend.

Beyond satellites: the cloud as a new locus of power

But while satellite dependency may be enough to turn the tide of a battle, it is nothing compared to the truly frightening reliance on cloud computing providers. A handful of American tech giants control the technical architecture upon which both the public internet and private computing infrastructure rely. It has come to be colloquially known as “the cloud”. The collapse of a major cloud provider could have far-reaching consequences, potentially disrupting access to medical records in hospitals, halting the operations of ports and railroads, interfering with financial market infrastructure, and wiping out critical data across businesses, utilities, and public agencies. According to estimates, a three- to six-day outage at one of the top providers could result in up to $15 billion in damages (see here).

As the headline of a recent Politico feature noted: “Trump can pull the plug on the internet, and Europe can’t do anything about it.” Of course, no one wants Trump’s finger on this button. But as Musk and his satellites make clear, it is not just the US president that has control over critical infrastructure for countries around the world: it’s American companies and CEOs.

What should we make of the power of these Silicon Valley technology corporations? For many commentators, the political power they wield seems new and unprecedented, either because of the enormous scale of the corporations or because of the uniqueness of their technology. Satellites, for instance, orbit above states territory and airspace: the Ukrainian government could not simply march upon and seize control of the infrastructure, in the same way that state governments might have been able to nationalize and conscript trains or telegraph stations. And although the cloud has its physical manifestation in earthly data centers, because of its architecture and data flows it too seems untethered from territory and traditional methods of state power and territoriality. Legal scholar Jennifer Daskal has even argued that we should understand the cloud as “unterritorial”.

Corporate power: historical continuities and democratic challenges

And yet, despite the distinctiveness of the technology, the relationship of dependency between corporations, states and societies is centuries old. Corporations that went out in search of profit often ended up buying or building imperial infrastructures that states or societies depended upon, using it for their own advantage in order to negotiate concessions. We might think of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran, for instance. Even the current internet cables are laid over telegraph lines built by consortiums originally intended to connect empires. And while we may think of states as the primary actors in empire-building, in reality corporations were both its engines and executors (Stern, 2025).

More often than not, of course, the interests of corporations and the states that chartered them are aligned, as Trump’s support of Starlink global expansion demonstrates. But these relationships can also rupture. The American Revolution, most famously, saw companies-turned-colonies rebel against their home state to establish their own. And it was not inevitable that the most famous of all imperial companies, the British East India, would eventually be annexed by the British state. In that way, the Musk-Trump break-up may also parallel the history of empire.

Technology companies in digital sovereignty

Musk’s willingness to take power to its breaking point often shows the latent capacities underlying corporations and computer infrastructure all along. For example, in his role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk and his college-age team attempted to seize the computer infrastructure of dozens of federal agencies. What if Musk or Trump could push a button and turn off Treasury payments? The control of computer infrastructure might allow them the technical ability to do so, even when Congress has legally appropriated the budget.

While DOGE’s computer coup might seem especially outrageous, it is not just societies but state governments around the world that have increasingly pushed to migrate government systems “to the cloud” – from Europe to Brazil to New Zealand. Former UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, for instance, came under questions by Parliament for her decision to contract the sensitive infrastructure of British spy agencies’ with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Not only European or international industries, but also governments themselves are dependent on American companies. Like the Ukrainian military, states around the world may find pleading their only remaining option if companies decide to switch these critical infrastructures off.

In both policy and scholarly discourse, worries about “digital sovereignty” have abounded for decades. In Europe, for instance, the Snowden revelations prompted fears about the ways in which American companies must comply with US laws and demands to turn over data on European citizens. But this also extends to other types of control: after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for instance, the top prosecutor found that the Microsoft-hosted email account of the office had been suspended. And as Musk reveals, this is not just about American state power: it is about corporations.

Conclusion

For all the push towards increased state regulation, the role of corporations in both global history and empire specifically shows that there is no “solution” to the problem of corporate power. Corporations are political actors with political power and ought to be treated as such. One implication of this insight is that, like states, corporations ought to be democratized, with CEOs no longer allowed to run their companies as petit-monarchs. This would, of course, require a fundamental reimagining of the corporate demos to avoid an imperial corporate democracy.

But if we do not treat corporations as political, rather than economic or business actors, we will end up depending on their infrastructures and believing their assurances that they will always be trustworthy and fair towards their customers. Then it will truly be Starlink and AWS who are running our wars.