How concerned should South African businesses and consumers, reliant as they are on US technology platforms and information infrastructure, be about the Trump administration’s drift into authoritarianism?
The world has always lived with the fact that while the internet is global, it’s built largely on US platforms. Historically, that hasn’t been a real problem. For all its faults (and it has many), until recently the US was, on balance, a force for good and a defender of democracy, free markets and the post-1945 liberal world order.
Yet now, the country where most influential “information infrastructure” companies — from cloud providers to enterprise software and consumer platforms — are headquartered has become dangerously volatile, a place where federal agents are attacking and killing citizens in the streets.
In recent days Minneapolis has been ground zero for protests and the escalating confrontations with citizens, including the disputed use of force. But the whole country looks to be at risk of spiralling into chaos and repression.
President Donald Trump’s White House and the department of homeland security have unleashed rhetoric that treats criticism as illegitimate, paints opponents as enemies of the state and demands near-automatic deference to federal agents. We’ve seen this before, and it ends in violence and war.
Could a platform grab be next? The temptation may be too much for Trump to resist
The odious Trump and his repulsive vice-president, JD Vance, have defended the tactics of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, a message they hear as permission and encouragement. The administration is sending a clear message: “Carry on as you are, we have your back.”
When a government’s instinct is to close ranks, discourage scrutiny and delegitimise institutional checks, a simple question arises: if it’s increasingly comfortable with force and opacity at home, how will it behave in respect of data beyond its borders?
For global companies, the risk is not that US big tech suddenly becomes “evil”. Rather, it’s that it becomes governed in a different way.
US law already gives Washington powerful mechanisms to compel access to data held by US firms, even when that data belongs to foreigners and sits in overseas data centres. Political conditions shape how aggressively those tools are used.
An illiberal administration can push for wider data-sharing, faster compliance and more secrecy, while pressuring regulators and watchdogs who might otherwise resist. Could a platform grab be next? The temptation may be too much for Trump to resist.
So, what should South Africa, and everyone else, do?
Decoupling from US tech in a dramatic, overnight rupture wouldn’t make any sense. It’s not practical. The answer, rather, is to derisk as far as possible: plan for alternatives, reduce single-country concentration and design systems so that a worst-case political scenario in Washington cannot become a single point of failure.
Companies should consider diversifying cloud and critical software-as-a-service dependencies. They should adopt a multi-cloud strategy for key workloads and insist on portability, including open data formats that make it easier to switch platform providers.
They should treat data sovereignty as an engineering imperative. Encrypt sensitive data end-to-end and minimise what any platform or software provider can see.
South Africa can’t recreate cloud “hyperscalers” alone, but it can strengthen local and regional capacity in information infrastructure. It should work more closely and strategically with natural allies, including Canada, Australia and the EU.
Governments and large enterprises should mandate standards and portability in contracts. If the world wants leverage over big tech, it comes from being able to leave on its own terms.
None of this requires anti-Americanism. In fact, the fervent hope is that US institutions, especially Congress, do a better job of constraining Trump’s worst impulses. There are signs of a growing fightback. Indeed, the US still has deep democratic infrastructure, independent courts and a civil society that is loudly contesting the current direction of travel. But the lesson is that when politics turns coercive, systems built for convenience can become systems of control.
The smart move for South Africa — and for any country that values its autonomy — is to plan for the worst without yet committing to it: reduce dependency risk now and be ready to pivot if the authoritarian slide in the US starts translating into extraterritorial demands on the world’s data.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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