Sovereignty is a confusing word for most people, and Raju Vegesna opened our conversation by saying so directly. Rather than start with legislation or the latest AI headline, he went back to history. Trade has always followed water. Rome, Paris, Delhi, San Francisco, Sydney, every major city sits next to a river or a coastline, because water carried the goods and the customs checkpoints grew up wherever the water met a border.

The River Analogy, Extended

Vegesna's point is that internet backbones are the digital equivalent of those rivers, and the checkpoints have simply moved to app stores and payment gateways. About 95 percent of those backbones are privately owned. His historical reference is the British and Dutch East India companies, private entities that ended up governing territory because they controlled the trade routes running through it. He is not predicting that any single vendor will govern a country. He is naming the discomfort that surfaces when a small number of private companies own the infrastructure a country's trade, communication, and increasingly its intelligence depend on.

This is the throughline of Who Owns the Plug as a series. Earlier installments have pressed on the same discomfort from different angles, including the question Vegesna has asked publicly before: if someone can pull the plug on your intelligence, are you really sovereign? Part six is where the historical framing finally gives that question a shape people outside the AI industry can picture.

Awareness Is the Hard Part, Not the Slogan

What makes this conversation worth a full post rather than a comment is that Vegesna refuses to make sovereignty sound easy. Why is Chrome open source while Google Search is not? Why is Android open while the apps and the data they generate are not? His answer is that the free piece is always the pathway, and the pathway exists to get you to the destination, where the money is made. He extended the same read to the Model Context Protocol, open, while the model behind it is the asset every AI vendor is racing to protect.

The reason this is a serious problem rather than an easy one to solve is that awareness alone does not fix it. Vegesna was clear that becoming sovereign usually means giving up access to technology someone else built faster and cheaper, and he compared the tradeoff to nuclear capability. Not every country, and not every company, can afford to build its own frontier model, its own compute, its own backbone. The ones that do are making a multi-year bet that control is worth more than convenience, years before the market forces the choice on them.

Do you own the house, or does your bank own the house? It happens at every level. It happens at the country level, the company level, the individual level.

What This Costs in Practice

Zoho's own infrastructure, 16 data centers, an in-house model in Zia LLM, custom server hardware, is what that tradeoff looks like in practice rather than in theory. It is a long and expensive route compared to renting frontier capacity from someone else's cloud, and the payoff is not guaranteed. That is precisely why the conversation matters. Sovereignty awareness is easy to say out loud. Building toward it, or choosing consciously not to, is the harder and more honest question every organization eventually has to answer.

This builds on prior shashi.co coverage of Zoho's sovereignty strategy, including the case that owning the stack was always Zoho's bet, its multi-year push toward transnational localism across data center regions, and the argument that its custom hardware program reflects a bet against cloud dependency rather than a cost exercise.

About Shashi Bellamkonda

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