Digital Sovereignty and Resilience

Abstract

Resilience in communication networks has been a field of study for decades. However, resilience has been studied by assuming that network actors are benign. Increasingly, digital sovereignty, where nation states and territories exercise jurisdiction over data residing or flowing in geographical areas in their control, is playing a role in the thinking of network design. In this paper, we scan some of the issues surrounding digital sovereignty and examine its interaction with traditional approaches to resilience. We describe some open problems in the area, such as developing a sovereignty metric that can interact with availability metrics in communication networks.

Keywords: Digital Sovereignty, Resilience

JEL Classification: Y8, Y9