Min Tang publishes on the geopolitics of the global cloud systems

IAS faculty member Min Tang recently published an article on the issues of data sovereignty and information governance brought by the transnational cloud computing systems in Information, Communication & Society (iCS), a top scholarly journal with global and interdisciplinary perspectives on the development and application of information and communications technologies (ICTs).

The article, The challenge of the cloud: between transnational capitalism and data sovereignty, examines the challenges posed to cross-border data governance with the rise of transnational cloud platforms. Drawing upon critical political economy approach, Tang argues that the commercial cloud platforms have become the critical information infrastructures which materialize and territorialize users’ data across geographical and sovereign boundaries. An emerging and understudied issue, the governance of the cloud is highly contested among state entities, businesses actors and civil societies. Whether it is in the United States, China or European Union, the state is a core architect of their differing approaches and policy frameworks that reflect the changing dynamics in information geopolitics and thus cannot be dismissed from the Internet governance discussions.