Open Rights Group says years of reliance on US giants have left Britain exposed
Britain has spent years wiring its public sector into US Big Tech, and a new report says that dependence could quickly become a national security headache.
The warning comes from Open Rights Group, whose latest report, "Tech Giants and Giant Slayers," argues that the UK has let a small group of American megacorps entrench themselves across critical infrastructure, shaping not just systems but policy itself. The result is a mix of economic drag, security exposure, and a growing inability to act independently when it matters.
The risk shows up when politics is involved. The report points to US sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC) for issuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, and claims Microsoft shut down email and banking-related services for affected individuals. The report says this shows how "tech powers of sanction" can cut off access entirely, and what that might look like if UK-US relations soured.
"For years, a handful of Big Tech companies have used their power to gain control of the UK's digital infrastructure, locking the government into wasteful contracts and shaping tech policy in their favour," said Jim Killock, ORG's executive director. "This overreliance on foreign tech companies is now an urgent national security issue as well as an economic threat."
The report goes further than the usual vendor lock-in grumbling, arguing that Big Tech has actively controlled markets, limited innovation, and lobbied government, including pressing to halt AI regulation, weaken data protection, and blunt competition law – effectively helping to write the rules that keep it embedded.
The Competition and Markets Authority says at least £500 million a year is being overspent on cloud services, and that's before you add in projects that overrun, suppliers that never quite leave, and systems everyone avoids touching.
It's not just a money problem. The report points to the legal side of all this, where laws like the US CLOUD Act and China's National Intelligence Law can force companies to hand over data or open the door to systems. Whether the UK is happy about that doesn't really come into it.
Politicians from across the spectrum have lined up behind the findings. The Green Party's Sian Berry warned the UK "must build much more resilience to protect our critical digital infrastructure from the potential threat of sanctions and service withdrawal," while Labour's Clive Lewis said Big Tech firms have "embedded themselves in our public services," leaving the country "dangerously vulnerable."
The report also takes a swipe at current policy, arguing the government is doing all it can to "reinforce dependency," pointing to contracts awarded to Palantir Technologies as evidence the problem isn't being solved so much as expanded.
The proposed fix is familiar: more open source software, more domestic capability, and a deliberate push toward "digital sovereignty," defined as control over infrastructure, data, and technology. Or as Killock put it: "Public money should be spent on public code that benefits us all, rather than lining the pockets of Big Tech's shareholders."
For now, though, the UK's digital estate remains firmly plugged into systems it doesn't own – and, as the ICC episode allegedly showed, might not always be able to rely on. ®