(introduction to this series of interviews can be read here)
I met James Gorgen, a public functionary at the Brazilian Ministry of Development and Industry, over an online call I did from Rio de Janeiro while he was connecting from Argentina where he currently lives. James has long been a thoughtful commentator on digital developments and continues to curate an intellectually stimulating presence on LinkedIn, X, and especially on his personal blog.
Our conversation took place the day after the publication of an important article on how Big Tech has transformed sovereignty into a product—a topic explored in depth in Rafael Grohmann’s excellent piece, “Sovereignty-as-a-service: How big tech companies co-opt and redefines digital sovereignty.” Like many other Brazilians I have spoken with, James highlights a core contradiction at the heart of Brazil’s digital sovereignty agenda, itself the outcome of compromises within the leftist government: given the existence of public telecommunications companies, why is the state contracting U.S.-based platforms to build and operate its data centers?
What do you mean when you talk about “digital sovereignty”? What is the meaning of the word in today’s debate? 
Before we start, a quick clarification. I’m speaking as a public servant and practitioner, but I’m not representing the Ministry of Development and Industry. Everything I say is my personal opinion. On the digital sovereignty as a concept, I think that the entire world is still searching for the best definition.  We have national sovereignty, with a long historical journey around this type of concept. For me it’s very related to self-determination: the adoption and use of technologies to have autonomy, and some control over data and infrastructure. But beyond this, the central point is that we need to build national capacity to manage all these things. The main three pillars are: data, infrastructure, and algorithms. 
I think we have a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about the concept, in South America, Europe, and other regions. At the same time, companies have developed marketing approaches and narratives about “digital sovereignty”. Firstly, they were applied to the cloud, and now to artificial intelligence. They offer solutions for cloud, for example, and governments accept them without questioning or critically assessing these options. We first need to clarify what we are talking about. It’s an important discussion in South America but also in Europe and Asia, which are entering very quickly into this debate against the market approach. We need to debate and reflect on it.
We don’t have too many people writing about this in South America. I am not an academic scholar, but I consider myself an evangelist of this topic because I’m trying to create more literacy about digital sovereignty. Around the world, I follow Marietje Schaake. Francesca Bria is also interesting, more of a practitioner, and Cecilia Rikap is the best for me, very concerned about digital sovereignty and cloud sovereignty. I am working on this concept that I call “digital diplomacy”. To me, the success of Big Tech narratives is because they have corporate diplomacy: not just lobbying, but political diplomacy across institutions and channels. It’s a new lens we can use.
At the same time, Big Techs are under pressure: digital sovereignty narratives and alternatives are emerging. They’re losing a bit of space, and they are very concerned about this. In the first leftist government we had in Brazil, we never talked about digital sovereignty. Even the Trump-era dynamics helped accelerate this against their propaganda. I wrote about the new digital geopolitics. We need to enjoy this moment to write and lead projects. Brazil is in a very good position: we’re not a small republic; we’re among the top markets in social media adoption, we are the fifth market in terms of streaming adoption. We are early adopters of most digital services, around 85% of the people connected. As a democratic statesman, President Lula has a different view and leadership in terms of digital speech, and he has been talking about this in the UN General Assembly and in BRICS and Mercosur. We support a lot of things related to digital sovereignty, AI, and misinformation. 
For me, the other side of the coin of digital sovereignty is digital public infrastructure (DPI) – another keyword that’s increasingly being used. Are they related?
Yes and no. This is another problem with these concepts. For me, if you discuss digital public infrastructure but do not discuss the physical infrastructure, it’s a trap. You give the physical infrastructure to private companies and focus only on apps and platforms, in terms of identity, payments, data interoperability, but you lose autonomy and self-determination. By physical infrastructure I mean what’s behind the cloud: the cables, the hardware, the chips that allow for connectivity, processing and storage. We need to discuss the two things together, and almost nobody is doing this. India started with this concept in the G20, and after that there has been a lot of interest around these projects, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Microsoft, and other financial institutions and companies are creating some consensus around the DPI concept. To me, this is a trap if it ignores the physical layer. 
I understand, however the other day I was on the boat from Niterói to Rio de Janeiro when a deaf man asked for money and gave me a little paper. In the paper there was his Pix number. For me PIX is a very concrete and pervasive example of digital public infrastructure from Brazil. What do you think about PIX?
In Brazil we had a very low access to banks before that. Now we have a lot of people using fintechs and also Pix. This is obviously a progress. But the problem is that, for example, recently there was outage of Amazon Web Services, and Pix experienced issues related to this, because the physical and processing infrastructure is under Amazon and other international players. To me PIX it’s not complete. If you accept it without critical thinking, you can enter this boat and have misunderstandings, because you show the population a good thing but lack control of the infrastructure and data. Don’t get me wrong, I also think it is a good thing, but the problem is what we have below this. For policymakers and lawmakers, we need to know everything, not only have an enchantment for technology. I’m not Luddite, but I’m also not integrated uncritically into the market.
What do you think about what the Brazilian government has been doing? Is it really buying “sovereignty as a service”? And can you tell us something about the efforts underway?
My personal view is that the Brazilian government is working on two levels. On one side, we are incorporating physical and processing infrastructure using what the market offers. It is a very pragmatic approach. Unfortunately, we have chosen this path; this is one thing we are doing, and to me it’s an error for the future and the long term because of legacy, lock-in, and path dependency.
At the same time, Casa Civil, which is Brazil’s powerful presidential chief of staff office, coordinating governmental and strategic policy, is trying to clean the field, engaging our own state tech and telecom companies: Serpro, Dataprev, and Telebras that run core government IT, data, and network infrastructure, including hosting the Gov.br DPI. They are purchasing and contracting services from Big Tech, but at the same time, civil servants are trying to convince them and the ministries involved to create alternatives, so we can avoid lock-in and dependency in the future, in the medium and long term. I think we have an ambiguous relationship with these companies.
President Lula is talking everywhere about digital sovereignty, and I think he strongly believes in this concept. But below that level, there is misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what he is talking about. I don’t know if it’s deliberate, or a matter of awareness, or capture. It’s not clear what some public servants are doing, because they are purchasing solutions from all the Big Techs, even the Chinese ones, like Huawei. I don’t know what the strategic goal is.
What are the trade-offs Brazil is facing? What possible pragmatic moves can South America make for the next five years?
It’s a difficult question. We have path dependency, lock-in, and security problems about data control and control of physical infrastructure. This is the heritage we risk leaving for the future, and it’s the same across countries around us. To try to escape this, we need regional alliances to create another trail. We need to try to build this. Unfortunately, this depends on a lot of things: semiconductors, GPUs that we need to import, and cloud capacity. But we need to create capacity here, maybe with the help and support of BRICS members and other countries. But even China has similar objectives to U.S. Big Tech, so that’s a risk; even so, we should try to do something.
We can try to do something in Mercosur, which is the South American trade bloc including Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and others, and it is now under our presidency, as it is with the BRICS until December.  We can try to restart initiatives as sovereign data centers. Even with LLMs, we can build models in our languages, and develop national models. But this is very embryonic. For example, Chile has taken steps back on data center policy, leading to Big Tech domination, both around the narrative and the infrastructure itself. In Colombia there are similar issues. Argentina is receiving a lot of money from the U.S., and I think Milei will do everything the U.S. wants even in this area. OpenAI is starting a Stargate’s arm here. We don’t have Argentina as an ally. But with Colombia, with Mexico, maybe with Russia and Indonesia, we can start something. Here in Brazil, we have a private national cloud service, Magalu, and we’re trying to talk with them to create a data center ecosystem for a sovereign cloud.
When you say sovereign cloud, I guess your idea goes beyond data localization and towards something more like a public-utility model, where national companies in strategic sectors provide services and control infrastructure. Is that what you imagine, or more public–private partnerships?
We need both. For strategic data and public assets, for instance about security and defense data, we need to build infrastructure totally owned by the state. We’ll still need to import components—cards, processors, semiconductors—and have servers, but under total state control. For example, base-income programs like Bolsa Família, a program that provides income support to low-income families, and the Cadastro Único, the unified registry that identifies and enrolls low-income households for social programs, should be under state infrastructure. 
But we also need to develop national infrastructure and an ecosystem to compete with Big Techs. We’re not talking about expelling Big Tech from Brazil, but we need competitors and coordination to create what I call a Brazilian digital ecosystem. We have a bit of this already, but without political or institutional coordination, and that is a risk. 
In the EU, changing the infrastructural power faces the challenge of existing competition rules and free movement rules; we used to be the colonizer, now we are completely colonized. How do you see the EU approach?
We have academic authors in Brazil, including former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, writing about dependency theory in South America and Latin America. The European Union is now doing something similar. In my view, it is a historical error. Since around 2016, Europe started to walk in the direction of regulation as the only alternative to avoid Big Tech domination. That’s one path, but they forgot industrial policy and trade policy. Now they’re trying to restart or retrieve these.
Brazil is trying to do both at the same time. Lula sent to Congress draft bills related to economic regulation, protection of kids and teenagers online, and tariff regimes to import infrastructure and components for data centers. We also have Nova Industria Brasil, the industrial policy working with digital transformation, and we are trying to create, around data centers, a value chain under this umbrella—building something more complete. Under the Casa Civil there is the CIT-Digital, initiative and a Digital Economy Chamber that is starting to build things related to infrastructure and a national policy for data economy. We will start a public consultation about this last topic. To me, this completes the package: regulation together with infrastructure, industrial and development policies, and data. The problem is, of course, the implementation. We have different views, we need more public coordination, and the state needs to put resources into leading this. But I think this stack is the best solution now to avoid Big Tech power and control over our digital infrastructures.