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Power & economics

Who owns the infrastructure, who sets the price, who can switch it off: the editions on platform power, monopoly, sovereignty and the economics of dependence.

Nobody in this stack needs to raise a price to hold power over you. Access can be a permission, the subsidy can be the strategy, and the value can be captured at a layer you never see. These editions map who can deny access, change the terms, or switch it off.

Start with this

You Own the Business. Who Controls What Keeps It Running? 24 September 2026. The map of the whole stack, silicon to application, and the chokepoint at each layer. Sovereignty as graded control that a buyer can test, with the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework as the yardstick, not a flag attached to a product.

The path

  1. Who controls AI? 26 March 2026. The Pentagon blacklists Anthropic over two contract clauses, and the model keeps running in classified systems the same week. The question of what an AI may do has no institutional owner. It is decided in contracts, clause by clause.
  2. The Subsidy IS the Strategy 21 May 2026. Every player's dominant move is to keep subsidising, because the first to raise prices loses share to whoever does not. The equilibrium is permanent margin compression, and the coding assistant, the era's best product, shrinks its own customer base.
  3. The Off-Switch Isn't Yours 18 June 2026. A letter from the Commerce Secretary switches a frontier model off for everyone, three days after launch. Model access stops being a product and becomes a permission, and the state reaches past the contract to the deployment.
  4. AI is Aggregating the Aggregators 16 July 2026. The interface that answers the question captures the intent-driven attention, the most monetisable share. Yesterday's platforms become supply, and identity resolution turns the aggregator into a political technology.
  5. The price is zero. The extraction is real. 13 August 2026. Consumer surplus in monopoly, updated: the surplus is not lost, it is converted into the firm's asset through data, prediction and lock-in, and then priced back by inferred tolerance.
  6. The AI monopoly price you don't see 17 September 2026. The second transaction that runs beside every use, the export illusion, and the exit test: if I leave tomorrow, how much of the value I created here comes with me? The competitive problem is contestability, not ownership.
  7. You Own the Business. Who Controls What Keeps It Running? 24 September 2026. The clause and the switch were each one layer. This is the map of all of them, and the practical test: find the dependency that can stop deployment or extract the highest rent, then measure how easily you can substitute it.

Further along the same line

What changed

In March the answer to "who controls AI" was: the contract. June corrected it. The contract is sovereign until the state decides otherwise, and access is a permission. Over the summer the argument moved from the switch to the price: the subsidy holds because nobody can defect, the aggregator keeps the moment that matters, and a monopoly no longer needs a posted price because use itself builds the moat. September put the pieces on one map. The question is not what you own but which dependency can stop you, and what it would cost to replace it.

Questions to take into a meeting

  • At each layer, chips, cloud, orchestration, model, application: who can deny us access, change the terms or inspect our data, and by what instrument, a clause, a licence, an export rule?
  • If we left tomorrow, how much of what we built here comes with us: prompts, agents, permissions, integrations, evaluation history, the habits of our people? An export button answers none of that.
  • Is the price we pay today a price or a subsidy? What does the supplier's own accounting say about how long it lasts, and what happens to our terms when it ends?
  • Which supplier sits between us and the model, the hosting and the identity at once? Its revenue understates its power.
  • Where does the margin go? If value accumulates at a layer we never see, our product is a tenant.
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