Has Canada become a digital colony of U.S. tech?
I found myself ruminating on this question after listening to Gloves Off, a podcast by the Alberta-born writer, essayist, and commentator Stephen Marche. Launched in 2025, the series dives into all of Canada’s vulnerabilities regarding the United States, and what we can do about them. The subject of digital sovereignty, particularly, gave me a real fright.
One of Marche’s guests was an International Criminal Court judge sanctioned by the Trump administration for investigative action the administration didn’t like. Her emails and cloud storage stopped working. She couldn’t do any online banking. Her Amazon accounts were cancelled. Her life was, in a sense, plunged back into a pre-internet world because it was built on U.S. technology, and the U.S. abruptly turned it off.
Now, are little-old-me or -you likely to be the target of personal sanctions? Of course not. But can the same be said of our country?
Marche and his Gloves Off expert guests make the case that Canada, and many other parts of the world, find themselves as “digital colonies” of the United States. That’s to say, much of our digital infrastructure, our digital lives, rest on U.S. tech stacks, the layers of software subsystems or components needed to create digital tools and American end-user programs.
As one guest put it, it’s as though we invited a foreign government to build critical national infrastructure like roads and bridges, continue to let them own that infrastructure, charge whatever they want for it, “and if we attempt to have even the smallest rules around it…they would freak out, have a tantrum, and threaten to destroy us.”
“There’s a word for that, and it’s colonization.”
The point is, the United States can, when American tech firms are aligned or coerced into action, seriously harm Canadian businesses and individuals. Marche makes the point that technology was never associated with the nation-state in the optimistic days of the 1990s. However unfortunate, though, we find that association very real today.
Speaking to Marche in mid-October, he pointed to several additional areas of concern.
Social media might be the most obvious. Elon Musk’s X and Facebook (Meta), for example, are driven by algorithms that foment anger. They can also be wielded as weapons, as we have seen in the boosting of separation messaging in Alberta.
Then there’s the need for sovereign internet capability.
Marche points to the Ukrainian military’s dependence on Starlink as an example of dependence turned vulnerability. Elon Musk, the Trump administration, or both, have restricted its use over Russia and, more recently, throttled the speed at which Ukraine can wield offensive and defensive weapons.
Consider how many rural businesses and remote communities rely on Starlink for internet capability. What if Musk and Trump decide, for example, to cut off service over fossil fuel, potash, or even water-related trade issues? Again, this is probably unlikely. That it’s possible is the point.
The Gloves Off podcast logo. Photo: Gloves Off website
“Three months ago, a sovereign internet is being built. We are launching our own satellites to compete with Starlink,” says Marche. He adds the Europeans have “figured this out already,” and are launching their own satellites to insulate themselves from “an individual human” who can “turn off the internet in various parts of the world.”
Where data goes also matters.
If, for example, all of your farm data is held by a U.S. company, and on servers in the United States, there is a possibility you could lose access to it if someone in a place of power decides it should be so. Marche also argues data provided to foreign owners makes innovating at home much more difficult.
“Data is not seen effectively as a commodity, even though it is easily the most important aspect,” he says.
“Oil doesn’t flow free across the border, but if all the farming data from Canada is processed in an American space, they will literally control the capacity to innovate in that space for the future…That’s way worse than controlling, you know, a tariff on steel. In terms of our long-term ability to stand on our own two feet, the data flowing south, that’s the essence of the problem.”
By his own admission, the irony of Marche’s Gloves Off series is that it’s powered by U.S. technology – YouTube and Google Docs, for example. The very programs and operating system I’m using to write this column are all American.
Canada achieving even a degree of digital sovereignty can thus seem like a nigh-impossible task. But for Marche, it’s a matter of imagination. If we can imagine a world with good made-in-Canada background technologies and end programs, building digital sovereignty can be done.
