Big Tech companies, the very pioneers of the new digital age, began seeking refuge elsewhere — offshore, extra-territorial, eventually extra-planetary — as the regulators they had helped install turned on them. The chronicle traced the exodus across a decade, watching the founders take their quantum data centres with them.
What they left behind was an infrastructure without a steward. The masses, by then unable to imagine life without the network, voted unanimously to nationalise what was left. The global quantum network was born — not as a private product, but as a public utility whose users no longer had the right to opt out.