Bijuraj Sarangi

As much as we value innovation expanding globally, we are witnessing a growing risk of 3rd party control over sovereign needs whether it’s about business continuity, national security or the impact on economy in general. I wrote about the growing need for technological sovereignty earlier with the national interest and policy aspects in mind, but with the latest developments with Starlink, the considerations for sovereignty become far more important.

When a critical capability sits inside someone else’s jurisdiction, balance sheet or political mood, your continuity could only be as strong as their goodwill.

Ukraine: dependency tested in real time

Just this month, Ukrainian military officials reported that SpaceX had imposed a speed limit on terminals while in motion, affecting some units and forcing certain combat missions to be cancelled. Musk said any restrictions were the responsibility of the US government, echoing suggestions from Ukrainian defense officials. Whoever made the call, the point stands: a nation’s battlefield connectivity was subject to a decision that was controlled by someone else.

Further, Kyiv found that its European allies had no ready-made alternative. Switching networks would mean replacing thousands of terminals, because Starlink terminals use proprietary technology and cannot simply connect to OneWeb. This is lock-in at its most literal: hardware, protocol and operator bundled together.

It isn’t new either, in 2022 Musk refused to activate Starlink over Crimea, which effectively thwarted a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian warships.

My point here is not about Russia – Ukraine war nor I intend to make any statements. My broader point is the underlying strategy from Ukraine perspective using foreign tech drive their objective and failing to do so since someone else is in control.

Ukraine is now hedging. Its satellite company Stetman is advancing a $1.1b plan for a nationally controlled 360-satellite constellation starting in 2027, designed to put satellite communications under direct government and military control.

India: sovereignty through licensing conditions

India took a different route, using market access as leverage. Starlink received its GMPCS licence only after accepting conditions set by the Department of Telecommunications, including lawful interception mechanisms and a command-and-control centre within India. Data localisation rules also require KYC details and customer information of Indian users to be stored in India.

The guidelines go further. They require at least 20% indigenization of the ground segment within five years of commercial operations, a commitment not to copy or decrypt Indian telecom data outside India, and service restrictions during hostilities. Rather than saying no to a global provider, India tried to set the terms of entry and built a domestic capability requirement into the deal. Also, not withstanding the fact that larger national security risk remains unsolved leading to a stalemate situation that Starlink is not happy about.

Europe: from data residency to operational control

The cloud story is similar. Two incidents shaped European thinking: an Amsterdam bank reportedly lost access to its cloud services in 2025 after a US court order directed Microsoft and AWS to cease operations, and Microsoft blocked the email account of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor.

The industry response was quick. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud went live in Brandenburg in January 2026 with a €7.8b investment, and Gartner expects global sovereign cloud IaaS spending to reach $80b in 2026. Yet scepticism persists. European governments and companies fear these offerings cannot guarantee immunity from US legal action. And as one analysis noted, these offerings address operational and legal sovereignty, not the economic dependency on a single provider.

How this shows up in decisions now?

For governments:

• Critical infrastructure (space, cloud, telecom, AI compute, payments) is being reclassified as strategic and not just commercial
• Market access is becoming a negotiation: localisation, local control centres, interception, indigenisation targets
• Sovereign capacity is being funded even when it is more expensive or less capable in the short run

For businesses:

• Procurement now asks “who can switch this off, and under whose law?” alongside price and features
• Sovereign tiers and regional cloud variants are being adopted for sensitive workloads
• Boards are asking for exit plans apart from SLAs

The trade-off issue

Global platforms are often better, cheaper and faster than local alternatives. Even Ukraine’s partners concede that nothing currently matches Starlink’s capability. Politico reports Ukraine will have to remain dependent on it for now because no alternative matches its capabilities and efficiency. And Eutelsat’s CEO admits her company could not take over the entire connectivity load for Ukraine.

Six strategic considerations to balance the trade-off

1. Classify by criticality
Ask what happens if this capability disappears for 72 hours, 30 days or permanently.

2. Separate the types of sovereignty
Data (where it sits), operational (who runs it), legal (whose law reaches it) and economic (who can reprice or exit you) are different risks.

3. Design for substitutability
Open standards, portable architectures, and external encryption keys held by you make switching possible. Proprietary hardware and protocols make it painful.

4. Build multi-sourced resilience
Pair a best-in-class global provider with a qualified secondary, even if the secondary is less capable.

5. Negotiate sovereignty into contracts and licences
India’s model shows leverage exists: local control centres, localisation, audit rights, continuity commitments and service-level guarantees that hold under political stress. Businesses can also do the same at their scale.

6. Invest in a minimum viable sovereign core
You don’t need to own everything. Identify the crown jewels and ensure that capability, whether satellite links, identity, key management or core data platforms, has a domestic or controlled fallback. This is to be treated as an insurance.

In Summary…

Technology sovereignty is not about rejecting global providers. It is about knowing exactly which dependencies you’ve accepted, what they cost in risk terms, and what your plan is on the day the relationship changes.

The countries and companies that will fare best won’t be the ones that are most isolated or most dependent. They’ll be the ones that made the choice deliberately, before someone else made it for them.