The capture of our public infrastructure by private behemoths
Martin Blanchard, SHA London, September 2025.
Please join the inaugural meeting of the digital capitalism group, led by Martin Blanchard
Tues. 7th October, 7:00PM – Zoom below.
The UK government’s ‘Cloud First’ policy (2013 and updated 2023) has resulted in the use of US big tech (Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apple and Oracle) digital infrastructure aka ‘public cloud’ or simply ‘cloud’ across our public services. This includes the NHS with its own ‘cloud strategy’, and now with a 10 year plan in which the use of ‘technology’ is mentioned on 58 pages. Indeed, technology appears to be central to any attempt at improving healthcare productivity. To make this clear, ‘(public) cloud’ is cutting-edge ‘mega-computers’, storage facilities, and software services (the infrastructure) that is based within hyperscale data centres, and owned solely by big tech companies; and digitalisation of the NHS as planned means that the huge amount of data to be used and that has been gathered by Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) and other digital systems such as ambient AI, wearables, and clinical investigations will be stored and managed on ‘cloud infrastructure’ belonging to one or several of these five, multi-trillion dollar global tech companies.
Big tech will then provide the necessary access to NHS data as required by ‘cloud’ customers (as data controllers) such as NHS Providers or NHSE, and access to big tech’s huge store of its own data (see below) if needed, for use by: i) start-up companies and others who have to use ‘cloud infrastructure’ in order to develop innovations for NHS use and for the market; ii) hundreds of private ‘cloud customer service provider companies’ aka ‘partners’ such as Oso (see 33N reference in the link) who take customers to ‘cloud’ to arrange digital facilities; and iii) those companies who need to use their own software on ‘cloud’ in order to manage their customers’ large data sets as required-such as the NHS Federated Data Platform software service supplier Palantir-who are also big tech ‘partners’.
If big tech ‘cloud’ is to be viewed as a marketplace it is not one of equals, it is one of ‘subordination’ to and control by big tech. All start-ups or ‘partners’ on ‘cloud’ pay rent for the use of the ‘cloud’ infrastructure plus rent for any required extra ‘knowledge’/data that big tech own, and big tech receives a share of profits from any innovation that they have helped to achieve. It is the ‘partner’ companies on ‘cloud’ and not big tech that negotiate with and carry out work for the NHS providers to bring them to ‘cloud-based’ solutions. This big tech infrastructure has been compared to a ‘franchise’ or a ‘Global Value Chain’ (such as ‘Nike’) enabling big tech to gather most of the profits.
Big tech also has important, mutually beneficial relationships with ‘management consultant companies’ such as Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, PwC and McKinsey1 aka ‘partners’ who are trained so as to be able to recommend the use of big tech facilities to businesses or organisations seeking increased productivity through digitalisation-such as the NHS.
On its journey towards the development and deployment of ‘cloud’ to achieve its position of control and power, big tech has stolen ‘personal data’ from populations and ‘science knowledge’ from public institutions, and caused huge harms to the environment and abuse of human-rights across the globe. Big tech has also been part of the direct destruction of human life through the use of its ‘cloud’ and generative AI as a military and surveillance asset by the US and allied governments including in the Gaza genocide.
As far as the technology involved is concerned, it is with the help of trillion dollar investors that big tech has created monopolies in knowledge and compute to reach and remain at the cutting-edge of ‘cloud’ services, and to become the default infrastructure on which to train generative AI and perform large database analytics. Unlike machines of the past, generative AI improves in its performance as it works on data; so, when big tech offer AI as a service on their ‘cloud’ for a cost, they can also benefit from the improvement (and potential increased value) of any algorithms used that they own or in which they have invested, and from the reinforcement of their intellectual monopolies from any new knowledge that may have been gathered.
From an economic perspective, big tech’s profit gathering is unique. Instead of generating surplus value through capital investment where there are lower costs and high demand, big tech invests to bring different areas of societal activity under its control. It ensnares individuals, businesses and institutions because its services are not commodities as such, they are the ‘critical infrastructures’ on which society depends, allowing them as monopolists to charge exorbitant rents and to generate endless flows of monetizable data.
As stated above, big tech has been firmly placed at the heart of our government and across other areas of our public services to ‘improve productivity’ while its ‘cloud infrastructure’ has been designed over years to generate and extract enormous amounts of surplus value from the innovations created on it, and the ongoing solutions it helps to provide. A major concern, particularly in health and social care is that the interventions big tech ‘partners’ will provide for us to achieve greater ‘productivity’ and ‘equality’ of services will be ‘solutionist’ – reaching populations through their ‘pockets’ via ‘services’ on phones and wearables2; using ‘gamification’ (see link); and reducing costs possibly by eschewing any need for increased future professional workforce investment such as through the development of the MicrosoftAI-Orchestrator in medical diagnosis.
But while there are many important reasons to keep big tech out of our healthcare, the same encroachments into our government are even more worrying and threaten society as a whole. The recent requests from the Trump administration for big tech to render the US government ‘more modern and productive’ serve to increased big tech influence and will empower all private interests further at the expense of public institutions in the US and abroad. The new data and knowledge solely acquired by big tech from this work in public services will allow them, as political economist Cédric Durand says, to begin to centralise ‘the algorithmic means of co-ordination of all public activities’, and as public institutions are rendered incapable of organising society’s needs4, the task will then fall to big tech with all the power that brings.
To take this to its potential conclusion, as Durand also states: ‘the public sphere dissolves into online networks….and AI colonizes what Marx called the ‘general intellect’5 heralding the inevitable appropriation of political power by private interests and corporations’ -also see Durand’s book6.
The entry into our public services by US mega-corporations which are so close to the US administration must be seen for what it is: tech-based ‘colonial’ primitive accumulation and we must reject them if we are to maintain ourselves as a separate, sovereign state. Other countries are trying – sometimes jointly – to create alternatives to big tech control of ‘cloud’ by developing regional state funded sovereign ‘clouds’ and digital infrastructure capacity, and taking control of their ‘cloud’ related resources (see for examples: an International call for Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty, developing European proposals, concerns from Denmark, and ongoing negotiations across Latin America.) Indeed, past and present big tech behaviour elsewhere in the world suggests that we must do the same.
Topic: Digital Capitalism Policy Group Meeting
Time: Oct 7, 2025 07:00 PM London
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1 Note McKinsey’s involvement in the NHSE Federated Data Platform
2Examples of how big tech once it enters our public services can exert power for its solutions can be read at Chatham House and heard in an interview of Seda Gürses, a critical computer scientist, by Arun Kundnani of TNI.
3by developing healthcare superintelligence……see link of latest genAI performance.
4In this August 31st 2025 interview Gita Gopinath the retiring IMF deputy chief explains that governments need to take a very close look at ‘entitlement’ spending including healthcare and social security in order to reduce public debt in order to avoid a future financial crash. Gopinath also says that she has spent some time researching the impact of AI and reckons that about 40 per cent of the global labour force is exposed to it.
5Marx K. Grundrisse: Foundation of the Critique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Classic in Association with the NLR 1993) pp 702-741
6Durand, C. How Silicon Valley unleashed techno-feudalism: the making of the digital economy. Trans by D. Broder Verso 2024 (First published as Technofeudalism: Critique de l’économie numérique. Éditions La Découverte 2020)