Por Joseph Grosso
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Since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020, people have been forced to reckon with the reality of chokepoints. Who could forget the shortage of facemasks or the sight of cargo ships parked thirty-deep at California ports? This year has featured the Strait of Hormuz, where normally about 25 percent of traded crude oil passes through. At the moment, though it’s still quite dangerous dodging Iranian drones, shipping volume some weeks has almost reached pre-war levels while the Black Sea has become the world’s deadliest shipping corridor. A crucial corridor for global grain supplies, by some estimates the number of attacks on ships is six times higher than in the Gulf. According to the International Maritime Organization more than 570 vessels have been struck in the Black Sea this year, killing at least 40 sailors (that compares with 24 confirmed deaths in the Hormuz). Meanwhile, it was reported over the summer that during a cabinet meeting Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto mused, “Do we realize that 70 percent of East Asia’s energy needs and 70 percent of its trade pass through the Indonesian straits?” – referring to the Strait of Malacca, where a third of global trade flows. Indonesian officials have since denied any plan to attempt to impose a toll.
Not all chokepoints are strictly geographical. The U.S. dollar has slowly lost a bit of its shine over time, but it remains a dominant part of global trade and finance. Successive U.S. administrations have put a lot of effort into freezing Chinese companies out of access to the most advanced chips and processors, most of which are manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The Financial Times recently reported that China has resorted to importing a million Nvidia gaming and workstation chips this year, turning to products never designed to power advanced AI. Not to be outdone, the Chinese government has periodically leveraged China’s dominance in rare-earth metal mining and processing to achieve its geopolitical goals. A rare earth cut-off in the spring of 2025 succeeded in getting Trump to back off some on tariffs. One could say Low-Earth Orbit is increasing a chokepoint given SpaceX’s dominance of satellite-based communication through Starlink. We have seen this power through Elon Musk’s effect on the war in Ukraine, cutting off Ukraine’s resistance several times. It certainly has been that reports have Europe scrambling to create alternatives. It will surely be a while as Europe’s current alternative is Eutelsat’s OneWeb. But OneWeb has only about 600 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites compared with over 10,000 for Starlink, and OneWeb’s are positioned further away from Earth. Then there is a chokepoint that hasn’t gotten as much attention: cloud technology.
What would happen, for instance, if Microsoft365 was blocked? In June 2024, a cybersecurity partner (CrowdStrike) mistake led to a global outage, affecting 8.5 million Microsoft devices (only 1 percent of Windows machines) causing airport shutdowns and large disruptions in emergency, banking, and even government services. The market for cloud services is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google: globally they account for almost 63 percent of it. Just this past quarter Microsoft reported a 48 percent jump in its Azure cloud business. It was the CEOs of these companies, along with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, that were seated in front of even the cabinet picks at Trump’s last inauguration. The companies each donated a million dollars to the inauguration fund (combine those with Larry Ellison’s Oracle Cloud and over that’s over two-thirds of the cloud market. Ellison dropped $45 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign). Take away Microsoft365 or Amazon Web Services and many government ministries will collapse, many firms will fail, not to mention many households will reel. This isn’t hyperbole. Last year the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, and his staff had their Microsoft emails and other services suspended after the U.S. applied sanctions to ICC staff in response to ICC investigations into key Israeli politicians. Alexandre de Moraes, the judge in Brazil who sentenced Jair Bolsonaro, also appears to have been targeted.
But it goes beyond petty politics. The cloud is where production happens at scale, where data is arranged and stored, software is produced, the architecture of platforms is designed.
As Cecilia Rikap describes in her book The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud:
their power is rooted in their control over global knowledge production, both within and beyond the tech sector. Big Tech controls the very technologies that determine knowledge and ignorance. These same technologies are essential to the organization of every productive process: from building a car to performing an X-ray…By controlling the essential technological scaffolding of global capitalism, tech giants become more than just the world’s largest corporations- they are political leaders and global economic planners.
Not coincidentally, these same platforms have undergone a general process of ‘enshittification’ (not often that an author coins a term that becomes a standard, but Cory Doctorow managed). ICE increased its reliance on Microsoft technology amid its increased immigration raids. Google, a thrice-convicted monopolist, has long cornered 90 percent of the market on search and has done a lot to keep it. Google has forked over $26 billion a year, including $20 billion to Apple, to be the default search engine on phones and browsers. The company has clearly made Google search noticeably worse to gum it up with more advertising and AI slop that nobody asked for. In fact, the company’s stock just saw a single-day loss of $500 billion in market value over concerns its “AI mode” searches are hurting its advertising business (the second-largest daily drop in Wall Street history after Nvidia’s $593 billion rout in January 2025). Google and Meta have long dominated digital advertising.
Amazon has followed what has become the standard playbook for platform capitalism: First, be good to users, then abuse users on behalf of business customers, then squeeze the business customers to grab almost all the value. As late as 2014, Amazon’s cost to sellers was still reasonable at about 19 percent of sales revenue. Yet, after establishing its online and logistical dominance (helped by buying rivals like Abe Books, Zappos, and Diapers.com) to hook sellers to the platform, Amazon ratcheted up fees, soon reaching 30 percent. Then there is the matter of the advertising fee to generate visibility on the site. Those who don’t pay get demoted toward the bottom on searches. Amazon’s advertising revenue was less than a billion in the early 2010s, but by 2024 it was up to $56.2 billion. On top of all this, Amazon gets to develop its own products based on the vast trove of data it gets from the site to compete with the same sellers it is squeezing.
From Uber to the airlines, this sort of stuff is ongoing. From algorithmic wages to ‘dynamic pricing’, for every digital racket that makes prices higher there is a twin to make wages lower (for a good primer, see Lindsay Owens’ new book Gouged: The End of a Fair Price and What it Means for Your Wallet). A recent study by Columbia Business School professor Len Sherman concluded that Uber has gotten its ‘take rate’ on U.S. rides to above 50 percent. Analysis by Princeton’s Workers Algorithm Observatory on ride-share data from Oregon found take rates of 44 percent for Uber and 52 percent for Lyft. Until Uber’s 2019 IPO, drivers were keeping 80-85 percent of fares (of course, back then, Uber, flush with venture capital, was able to undercut and devastate yellow cab service in cities).
And digital consolidation marches on. A 2021 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation revealed that Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple collectively made over 800 acquisitions from 2010 to 2019 (that included Meta’s acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp). DoorDash just announced its $17 billion acquisition of Instacart.
Opposition to all this has been piecemeal. Congress and dozens of states have introduced legislation that would prohibit the use of personal data to set or adjust prices (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Maryland passed laws). It needs to happen at the federal level. Even better would be a stronger resurgence of anti-monopoly organizing to break up tech monopolies.
Thinking bigger, digital sovereignty could become a real thing. Under Trump’s tariff assault and his spouting about making Canada the ‘51st state’, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carey proclaimed an ‘elbows up’ response yet, under pressure, Canada repealed the Digital Service Act that would have enacted a 3% levy on large tech companies. U.S. tech giants save billions in taxes by ‘moving’ to Ireland. Canada’s tech sector is expected to pay a combined 38% federal and provincial tax. Enacting such laws, along with the repealing of anti-circumvention laws, can allow more startups to flourish in more places. Finally, there is the possibility of a truly public cloud for tech collaboration and exchange, perhaps beginning with global healthcare (as Rikap recommends).
Ironically, it is Trump who has given much of the world the incentive. The world needs to follow through.
Joseph Grosso is a librarian and writer in New York City. He is the author of Emerald City: How Capital Transformed New York (Zer0 Books).
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