Cecilia Rikap, researcher: ‘Microsoft and Google are like salt: they’re on every plate’

“I work in what is called intellectual monopolization, specifically that of digital capitalism.” This is how Cecilia Rikap, a 40-year-old economics professor at University College London and research director at its Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, introduces herself. In recent years, Rikap has focused her research on examining how major technology companies monopolize the creation of knowledge — not just technological information, but also academic data, user data, and the production process itself — and how this consolidates their dominance in the market.

Rikap is currently advising the Brazilian government on its strategy for digital sovereignty, which aims to equip the country with the tools to reduce its dependence on major tech corporations. No other Western nation has made such a bold commitment to achieving technological independence. This initiative came into the spotlight earlier this summer, when a Brazilian judge ordered the shutdown of the social network X after its owner, Elon Musk, refused to block accounts spreading “Nazi, racist, fascist, hateful, and anti-democratic speech.” A few weeks later, X took action to address the issue, allowing it to resume operations in Brazil.

That move had consequences. Rikap promoted a letter signed by some 50 economists, including Thomas Piketty, Yanis Varoufakis and the new awardee of the Nobel Prize in Economics Daron Acemoglu, in which they denounced the pressure tech companies have placed on the Brazilian government to prevent it from implementing its digital sovereignty project. More recently, Rikap and other colleagues have compiled a document with guidelines on pursuing digital sovereignty. “The key is for the new digital ecosystem to be led by the public sector,” says the Argentine researcher via video call from London.

Question. You say that large technological companies centralize knowledge. How do they do this?

Answer. In global capitalism, the accumulation of capital is concentrated among large companies, which also monopolize intangible assets. I investigate how the dynamic of co-production and appropriation of knowledge take place. Basically, I look at scientific publications and patents, which comprise the available information, and analyze where they are generated and with whom they are shared. By that method, I identified in 2017 that Amazon was mutating from an e-commerce company to a technology company increasingly focused on the cloud. Already in 2020, we saw that the main focus of these companies’ research was artificial intelligence (AI), more specifically, machine learning and deep learning. They have done this alongside thousands of universities.

Q. Which companies are you talking about?

A. Fundamentally, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the dominating forces of the cloud. They control 70% of the global market, and that percentage isn’t larger only because they are unable to operate in China. These companies are also monopolizing the development of AI, a technology that can be applied to all industries, and potentially, to all areas of life, because it is also a tool used to invent. AI is the code, but also the models, the data and the ability to process. All these elements are dominated, in particular, by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The ability of the latter two to influence the AI research agenda is enormous.

Q. Do you think AI is controlled by two companies?

A. Microsoft and Google are like salt: they’re on every plate, they have a direct or indirect relationship with nearly everything that is done in the world regarding AI. They dominate the research agenda, they control what startups do, buying them or financing them. They also evangelize and control open-source software. At the first glance, this seems like an ideal situation, because they supply digital infrastructure to these companies, from data centers to software, but they render them dependent, and then it’s extremely expensive to cut ties with them and look for another alternative. On the other hand, when companies sell through the cloud that is primarily controlled by Amazon and Microsoft, they have to pay them a percentage, whether it’s a small or medium-sized enterprise or a giant like Coca-Cola or Inditex [the Spanish fashion company that owns Zara]. The latter makes its living via the knowledge it has about how to organize its production and inventory management process in the most efficient way, and that is intimately related to being able to use AI algorithms that analyze huge databases. So, their business depends on their service providers.

Q. So Amazon, Microsoft and Google are omnipresent in the digital economy.

A. The system is dominated by them, but not through property. And that is key because, if it weren’t the case, it would be clear to regulators that there is a problem. The large tech companies grow in the digital economy through control, through their ability to appropriate value.

Q. Did the Brazilian government ask for your help in getting out of this spiral?

A. After an initial visit through IIPP, I had personal and independent meetings with several ministries, and they asked me to look at their AI plan and help them to prioritize. What we are looking at is, how do you put together a sovereign AI and cloud development model for a peripheral country?

Q. Can you?

A. It’s clear that the cloud is fundamental and that there is a significant bottleneck there. Developing a truly public cloud would be key. But it’s not enough to only offer infrastructure, because it could be that a startup trains its model on your government cloud, but then goes and sells it to the Amazon, Microsoft or Google cloud, because that’s where the demand is. If you want to make an application with AI, you’re not going to develop the model, you’ll use one that is already made and that is probably in the Amazon, Microsoft or Google clouds. The idea that we are working on with the Brazilian government is to identify the bottlenecks that are created throughout the process and decide what type of AI we want. Initially, the idea was to develop a public cloud, a foundational AI model, and then incentivize startups or other companies to make applications, with the public sector as the first customer. The reaction from the big tech companies has been very, very forceful.

Q. What shape has that reaction taken?

A. They are trying to create internal tension within the Brazilian government. Since the moment that Lula [da Silva, the country’s president] announced the AI plan, Amazon as well as Microsoft began to say that they would increase their investments in the country. The Minister of Development, Industry, Trade and Services, for example, celebrated an agreement with Microsoft, which was signed during the Bolsonaro era, whereby they will dedicate $2.7 billion to develop AI services in public education. The government is finally deciding to build a platform using the big tech cloud that, despite my attempts and those of people who are part of the government itself, will not be completely independent.

Q. Can a country like Brazil resist this kind of pressure?

A. Yes. The key is organizing a regional response. A truly public cloud requires enormous investment. Also, if several countries take part, the system won’t fall if a single government, like that of [Argentine President Javier] Milei, makes that decision.

Q. Do you think the Brazilian model can be exported?

A. Yes, and it has more chance of success in the European Union than in Brazil, because there are more resources and a larger critical mass of people. Will Europe achieve independent AI with its plan for AI factories? No, because the startups coming out of it will end up in the cloud of Amazon, Microsoft and Google. In fact, in the U.K. and Germany, the public cloud is being developed directly from those companies. Another AI is possible, but it has to be planned. It cannot come from a private company, whether it be European or not. We must lose our fear of the word “planning.” It is not synonymous with something undemocratic: it’s what the big tech companies do, with little opposition. It is necessary that it be done another way. Otherwise, we are simply moving towards a more unequal world.

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