Clouds Over the Netherlands: Preserving Public Interest Internet Governance in the Era of Hyperscaler Clouds

The invisible backbone of our digital world—cloud computing—has suddenly become a political flashpoint following Trump's November 2024 election victory. Governments and institutions worldwide are now urgently reassessing their dependencies on American tech giants. Our report examines the adequacy of the Dutch response to growing cloud reliance through a critical case study: an important Internet governance organization's migration to AWS. We demonstrate that genuine digital transformation demands more than replacing foreign technology with local equivalents—or building new infrastructures on outdated colonial imaginaries—it requires reimagining the underlying political economy that shapes how digital systems operate.