Sovereign AI, the fragmented internet, data crawlers, and the opacity of consent forms: A dialogue on digital sovereignty

In this dialogue with Stéphane Couture and Sophie Toupin, the discursive point of departure is their canonical paper from 2019 on the various notions of sovereignty when referring to the digital—and what has changed since its publication in discursive, legal, and technological dimensions. In the conversation, Couture and Toupin trace the term’s evolution across activist, Indigenous, and state contexts, showing how it functions as a boundary object—a concept that travels between domains, is used by different communities and groups, while holding a stable identity. At stake here are issues of sovereign AI, the fragmentation of the internet, data crawlers as part of extractive generative AI, and the opacity of consent forms. Couture and Toupin emphasize design, infrastructure, and consent as crucial terrains where sovereignty is materially negotiated and constructed. Reflecting on digital resistance, Toupin and Couture argue that practiced digital sovereignty represents a conceptual shift from reactive defiance to proactive reappropriation: an affirmative politics of infrastructural self-determination. The dialogue revisits Indigenous and Global South perspectives, stressing digital sovereignty as a decolonial struggle for epistemic and material autonomy. Finally, Couture and Toupin question the anthropocentrism of sovereignty discourse, proposing a Latourian posthumanist understanding that remains attentive to ecological entanglements, opening up the imagination of a sovereign Earth as a provocative space for reflection.