U.S. Market Dominance

Digital sovereignty is hard to describe, harder to get and contested from every angle.

The digital economy is dominated by American companies with huge valuations and power they can leverage to dominate markets and politics.

McKinsey & Company compiled a list of the top 100 publicly traded companies in the world and organized them by country of control. In the chart below you can see that 59 are American including NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta.

When we are thinking about digital policy, this is the market landscape Canada is trying to govern.

These foreign digital multinationals are so big and so powerful that Canada has largely been intimidated out of asserting any meaningful governance in the digital realm. The end result is that our economy suffers — poor productivity and less wealth created in Canada. Our quality of life also suffers, as these companies exploit Canadians in ways that harm our mental health, invade our privacy, and even undermine our democracy.

Asserting meaningful digital governance is daunting, but it is essential for our national sovereignty and our future economic prosperity. Grappling with this challenge head-on is what Foundations of Digital Sovereignty is about.

Building sovereign governance structures in the digital realm is about both economic value capture and asserting Canadian values over how Canadians experience online platforms, digital services and connected technologies. If we get it right, we can build the internet we always knew was possible.