- Canada is driving a historic digital-trade initiative involving 39 nations
- It would create what FNTV calls a Digital Commonwealth worth $35 trillion
- Operational sovereignty could reduce dependence on American and Chinese systems
A new global digital power bloc is emerging.
America and China are not part of it.
Sit with that for a minute. Because if you are American or Chinese, you may have to live with the economic consequences for decades.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is headed to Brussels next week, where he will attend European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech before appearing before the European Parliament.
His visit could provide fresh momentum for a potentially historic digital-trade agreement between the European Union and the CPTPP.
Most Americans have never heard of the CPTPP. It’s time they started paying attention.
The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership is a trade bloc comprising Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United Kingdom and Vietnam.
It emerged from the original Trans-Pacific Partnership after Donald Trump withdrew the United States in 2017, declaring the deal harmful to American workers.
Washington took its ball and went home. The remaining countries found another ball, revised the agreement and carried on without America.
Since then, American tariffs and Washington’s increasingly transactional treatment of its trading partners have given middle powers additional reasons to build relationships that do not depend entirely upon the United States.
Blair Levin, who led the team responsible for America’s 2010 National Broadband Plan, described the consequences bluntly in a recent conversation with me:
“As America proclaims ‘America First,’ the rest of the world goes, ‘Really? That’s not the way we look at it.’ We look at it as: if that’s your strategy, we say ‘America alone.’ So you see all kinds of countries—our traditional allies—saying, ‘We have to move on from our relationships with America.’”
Canada and Europe appear to be doing precisely that.
The CPTPP makes trade across the Pacific easier without forcing its members to depend exclusively upon either the United States or China. Connecting it digitally with the European Union would dramatically reimagine that proposition—creating a common international digital language for the emerging AI economy.
If completed, the agreement would connect 39 countries, approximately 1.6 billion people and economies worth around $35 trillion under shared rules governing digital trade, cross-border data flows, data storage, e-commerce and digital services. Canada’s trade minister has called it potentially the largest trading agreement in history.
All these issues sit squarely under the heading of operational sovereignty, or OpSov—my soapbox for 2027.
Logan Wolfe, global head of sovereign cloud at Kyndryl, summarized the principle when I interviewed him about digital sovereignty recently:
“We tend to frame sovereignty as a fundamental risk-mitigation approach. You need to design for sovereignty as a strategy for optionality—and then the technology is a tool to get that done.”
In other words, operational sovereignty is not necessarily about removing every foreign provider. It is about preserving the ability to choose, change and continue operating when technology, trade or political relationships become unreliable. It is, for want of a better word, about freedom.
And that makes this bigger than yet another agreement about tariffs, beef, and brake pads. It could become the operating system for a new economic bloc.
May the force be with you
Two forces make it possible.
The first is technological. Sovereign and federated clouds, edge computing, zero-trust security, confidential computing, digital identity, software-defined networks, post-quantum encryption and independent control of data and cryptographic keys are, for the first time, mature enough to be combined to allow nations to interoperate without surrendering ultimate control.
The second is geopolitical. Governments are growing uncomfortable with a digital economy concentrated around American platforms and Chinese manufacturing. They want global integration without becoming digital lackeys of either superpower.
The United States would remain the world’s dominant architect of AI—but it would stand outside a new circle of trust within which digital-trade rules would be written. American cloud, AI and platform companies would still want access, but they could increasingly be required to follow standards established elsewhere.
A smaller bloc might be vulnerable to American pressure. But 39 countries with $35 trillion in combined economic muscle—including Peru!—are not to be trifled with [this is a Paddington Bear joke, so don’t cut it].
No CPTPP for you!
For China, the challenge is more structural. Beijing applied to join the CPTPP in 2021 but has not been admitted.
A digital agreement with Europe could strengthen requirements covering data flows, government access, subsidies, privacy and source-code protection—areas in which China’s state-directed model faces scrutiny.
Middle powers could begin building a third digital sphere encompassing a third of the world’s GDP: large enough to set its own rules, open enough to support international trade, but sovereign enough to resist control from Washington or Beijing.
I call this the Digital Commonwealth.
Its membership criteria pivot around a central question—not “Where are you?” but: Can we trust you and your systems?
Though it is not in their culture to celebrate it, this is fantastically good news for international carriers. Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Vodafone, BT, NTT, KDDI, SoftBank, Singtel, Telstra, Colt, Arelion, Tata Communications, Sparkle and Lumen already provide the connective tissue between these economies. Now they will play an essential role in building them into AI-enabled digital powerhouses.
Vendor beneficiaries include Nokia and Ericsson (trusted 5G and 6G infrastructure); Ciena (optical and subsea connectivity); Thales (cybersecurity, encryption and digital identity); SAP (sovereign enterprise software); OVHcloud, Scaleway, T-Systems and Orange Business (European-controlled cloud); and Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT (data centers and interconnection).
Companies that may find it potentially painful include AWS, Microsoft and Google (greater operational-control requirements); Meta, Apple and Amazon (harmonized platform and data rules); Huawei and ZTE (trusted-vendor restrictions); Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud (state-access concerns); ByteDance (data-governance scrutiny); and Starlink (competition from sovereign connectivity initiatives). These companies would not necessarily be excluded, but they could face stricter conditions.
Echos of history
Shipping routes, ports and merchant fleets carried the commerce of the old British Empire. Telecom networks, subsea cables, data centers and cloud interconnections would carry the traffic of this new commonwealth.
It would not be an empire built around British control—which is a shame, but okay. Rather, it would be a voluntary network built around mutual trust.
The 20th century organized power around territory. The 21st century may organize it around systems. And the most valuable commodity may not be compute. It may be digital—and political—trust.
Carney’s role in all this is not to be underestimated. Since recently pulling on his “not f***ing about” pants, he has become an important catalyst for the new bloc. Born in Fort Smith in Canada’s Northwest Territories, he is an improbable figurehead for a new global digital order. The world knew it needed a different kind of leadership. Who expected it to come from Fort Smith?
Author’s note: Next week, I will interview Logan Wolfe about this developing story, what an EU–CPTPP digital-trade agreement could mean in practice and whether it could deliver meaningful operational sovereignty. The story and video will be published Friday.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.