The Quiet Capture of Public Compute
Public services increasingly run on infrastructure they neither own nor understand. We trace the dependency, and ask what a sovereign alternative would actually require.
For most of the last decade, the question of where public software runs went largely unasked. Procurement teams bought capacity the way they bought electricity, by the unit, from whoever offered the better rate. The working assumption was that compute is a commodity, and that one supplier is much like another.
That assumption is now wearing thin. The services a council, a hospital trust or a benefits agency depends on are not rented in isolation. They sit inside a single provider's ecosystem of storage, identity, networking and machine-learning tools, each one easy to adopt and expensive to leave. The bill is predictable. The exit is not.
A dependency, not a market
A market implies substitutes. If your supplier raises prices or degrades service, you move. What has formed around public compute is closer to a dependency: the cost of switching has been engineered to exceed the cost of staying, almost regardless of price. Data has gravity, and the tools built to work with it pull everything else into the same orbit.
This matters beyond cost. When the same handful of firms underpin welfare, health records and policing alike, an outage is no longer one organisation's problem. A pricing decision made abroad becomes domestic policy by other means. And the expertise needed to run things differently quietly leaves the building, because nobody is paid to keep it.
Sovereignty is not ownership. It is the capacity to leave.
What it would take
A sovereign alternative does not mean every public body running its own data centre. It means keeping the option to move, and the skills to use it. In practice that rests on three things:
- Portability by default. Data and workloads held in open formats, on standard interfaces, so that leaving is a project rather than a rebuild.
- Local capacity. Enough public and co-operative provision that a credible alternative exists, not as a slogan but as somewhere to actually go.
- Public oversight. Contracts written so that the terms of dependence are visible, reviewable and reversible, before they harden into the only option.
None of this is exotic. Most of it was standard practice before convenience won. The work ahead is less about inventing new technology than about refusing to treat the present arrangement as the natural order of things. That refusal is where Field Station starts.