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Digital sovereignty in the AI age

Big Tech companies aren’t just large corporations. They’re political actors and economic planners. And their deep pockets and control over social media and personal data only partially explain their dominance, argues economist Cecilia Rikap.

In this talk, recorded at BESI on October 30, 2025, Rikap shows how big tech’s real power lies in its control over global knowledge production. Already the ruler of cloud computing, big tech can expect to grow its domination of knowledge production as the adoption of artificial intelligence becomes widespread.

What space remains for digital sovereignty? Rikap explores possibilities and strategies for expanding digital sovereignty — not only as an alternative to Big Tech’s ruling power, but also as an international and democratic strategy aimed at putting technology at the service of people and the planet.

About the speaker

Cecilia Rikap is an associate professor in economics at University College London and head of research at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She is a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and an associate researcher at COSTECH Lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne.

Rikap’s research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She currently studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies from digital and pharmaceutical industries, the distribution of intellectual (including data) rents, resulting geopolitical tensions, and the effects of knowledge assetization on the knowledge commons and development. She has published two books on these topics.

Her book Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered (Routledge) recently won the EAEPE Joan Robinson Prize Competition. The Digital Innovation Race: Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order (Palgrave), co-authored with B.A.K. Lundvall, presents an analysis of a new form of production where Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, and their counterparts in China, extract value and appropriate intellectual rents through privileged access to AI algorithms trained by data from organizations and individuals all around the world.