America's Digital Power Play
How Weaponizing Big Tech Will Backfire Spectacularly
6 June 2024
Robert Muggah and Misha Glenny have published a crucial analysis in Foreign Policy Policy that deserves urgent attention from anyone concerned about the future of global digital governance. Their piece, "Big Tech Is Part of Trump's Threat to the Global Order," exposes a profound strategic miscalculation that threatens to unravel decades of American digital leadership.
For over three decades, the United States was the guarantor of cyberspace neutrality. This wasn't altruism-it was brilliant strategic positioning. By championing the multi-stakeholder model, promoting open internet principles, and maintaining the fiction of Big Tech's political neutrality, America built the infrastructure for unprecedented global influence. Silicon Valley became the commanding heights of the digital economy, and American soft power flowed through every fiber optic cable and satellite link.
This approach accelerated globalization, embedded American values in global digital architecture, and created dependencies that made U.S. technological leadership virtually unassailable. Countries willingly adopted American platforms because they trusted-or at least believed-in their neutrality.
Under Trump, that foundational principle is being systematically dismantled.
As Muggah and Glenny document, we're witnessing the transformation of Big Tech from a nominally neutral global utility into an explicit instrument of American coercion. When Elon Musk can threaten to cut off Starlink to Ukraine, when Maxar Technologies curtails satellite access on Washington's orders, or when X algorithms boost far-right parties in German elections, the mask of neutrality has slipped entirely.
This isn't just about individual corporate decisions-it's about the systematic instrumentalization of digital infrastructure for hard power projection. The CLOUD Act already gave Washington sweeping extraterritorial data access. Now, under Trump 2.0's explicit politicization of these tools, we're seeing the full weaponization of America's digital dominance.
Here's the strategic blindness: this approach is fundamentally self-defeating. By abandoning the pretense of neutrality, the United States is destroying the very foundation of its digital hegemony.
When countries can no longer trust that American platforms will remain accessible during political disagreements, they will inevitably seek alternatives. When European leaders fear that Gmail or Microsoft Teams could be "switched off at White House request," as the Foreign Policy piece notes, they're compelled to develop sovereign alternatives.
This is classic nose-cutting-to-spite-face strategy. The short-term leverage gained from digital coercion will be dwarfed by the long-term costs of driving the world toward technological fragmentation and alternative systems.
What made American digital dominance so powerful was that it felt inevitable rather than coercive. Countries adopted American platforms because they worked better, not because they were forced to. This generated genuine soft power-the ability to shape preferences rather than merely constrain choices.
By explicitly weaponizing Big Tech, the Trump administration is converting soft power into hard power, but in doing so, it's destroying the soft power foundation that made American digital leadership possible in the first place. You cannot maintain hegemony through coercion alone, especially in a domain where alternatives are technically feasible.
We're already seeing the inevitable response. China's Great Firewall was defensive. Europe's digital sovereignty initiatives were reluctant. But now, as my colleagues document, even America's closest allies are actively seeking to reduce their digital dependencies.
The result will be the Balkanization of cyberspace-the very outcome that decades of American digital diplomacy sought to prevent. Instead of one global internet under informal American leadership, we're heading toward regional digital blocs, each with its own infrastructure, standards, and governance models.
This didn't have to happen. The United States could have maintained its digital leadership through continued investment in innovation, maintaining trust in platform neutrality, and championing the multi-stakeholder governance model that served it so well.
Instead, Trump's approach is accelerating the transition to a multipolar digital world-ironically achieving what decades of Chinese and Russian digital sovereignty advocacy could not.
The most frustrating aspect of this strategic failure is its predictability. When you weaponize the infrastructure that others depend on, they stop depending on it. When you politicize platforms that were trusted for their neutrality, they lose that trust permanently.
America's current digital dominance feels overwhelming, but dominance built on coercion rather than consent is inherently fragile. The very actions that seem to demonstrate American digital power today are laying the groundwork for its erosion tomorrow.
As Muggah and Glenny conclude, we're entering an era where digital sovereignty will define geopolitical independence. By forcing this choice on the world, the United States has ensured that many nations will choose independence over dependence-regardless of the short-term costs.
This isn't just bad policy; it's strategic malpractice. America is voluntarily surrendering the most powerful tool of global influence in the 21st century. The world will remember this moment as the beginning of the end of American digital hegemony-a decline that was entirely self-inflicted.
Read the full analysis: Robert Muggah and Misha Glenny, "Big Tech Is Part of Trump's Threat to the Global Order," Foreign Policy, June 3, 2025. https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/06/03/trump-big-tech-companies-silicon-valley-threat-geopolitics-digital-sovereignty/
Rafal Rohozinski Rohozinski is CEO of Secdev Group and a leading expert in cybersecurity and digital governance.