Who Owns The Plug? #2 - Shashi Bellamkonda, Info-Tech Research Group

By Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho

Welcome back to Who Owns the Plug?, a multi-format conversation series exploring data sovereignty's place in a world where AI reigns.

Our second episode features Shashi Bellamkonda, Principal Analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, in conversation unpacking what digital sovereignty really means, from historical trade routes to satellites, edge computing, and the coming wave of robotics.

In summary, digital sovereignty isn't a single switch. It spans data, compute, satellites, payments, energy, and hardware. Most organizations have already ceded more of that spectrum than they realize, often because companies give away the "pathway" to a technology (Chrome, Android, MCP) while keeping the real value locked up (search, the app ecosystem, the model itself).

That dynamic, plus the fact that a handful of private companies own most internet backbone infrastructure, is reviving an old discomfort: the same unease nations once felt when corporations effectively controlled territory. It's forcing a harder question about who actually controls the "digital borders" trade and communication flow through.

The response is a swing back toward edge computing and vertical integration, driven by sovereignty, security, privacy, and cost. Smaller, well-contextualized local models now rival frontier models for most tasks, so decentralizing serves everyone except the few cloud providers who benefit from staying centralized. But vertical integration (Apple, Tesla) just trades one dependency for fewer, deeper-locked-in vendors, so sovereignty doesn't get solved so much as it resurfaces at a different layer of the stack.

The full discussion can be viewed below: