Digital colonialism

Digital colonialism is the structural framing that names the domination of digital infrastructure, platforms, and AI governance norms by a small set of Global North corporations and states over the Global South as a form of colonialism — and that positions digital sovereignty as the structural counter-demand. Unlike the adjacent data colonialism framing developed in Latin American civil society, which addresses the asymmetry of data accumulation, and the algorithmic colonialism framing Abeba Birhane developed for the Africa-specific AI-and-corporate context, digital colonialism names the full-stack structure: undersea cables following colonial routes, cloud infrastructure owned by a handful of US corporations, platform monopolies governing public discourse in dozens of languages none of their executives read, AI governance norms being set by OECD and EU working groups in which the Global South participates only as an afterthought — and argues that this stack, taken together, reconstitutes a colonial order making the Global South structurally dependent on the Global North across the entirety of digital infrastructure.

Genealogy — from electronic colonialism to digital sovereignty

The framing's intellectual genealogy runs through Herbert Schiller's 1969 Mass Communication and American Empire — in which Schiller argued that US media corporations were engaged in a form of technological colonialism that subjected Third World nations to US cultural and commercial interests through the export of communication equipment and software — and Thomas McPhail's 1981 Electronic Colonialism, which extended Schiller's media-imperialism critique into a systematic framework naming the export of broadcasting and communication technology as a mechanism of dependency. Both arguments emerged from and fed into the UNESCO NWICO (New World Information and Communication Order) debates of the 1970s and 1980s, in which a bloc of Global South nations demanded restructuring of the international communications order to counter the asymmetry of media and cultural flows from the Global North. NWICO failed as a policy intervention — the US and UK withdrew from UNESCO in the 1980s partly in response — but its core structural argument, that information and communications infrastructure is a domain of North–South power and dependency, remained unresolved.

The contemporary crystallisation ran through two axes simultaneously. The civil-society practitioner axis was shaped most consequentially by the 2014–2016 campaign against Facebook's Internet.org / Free Basics programme — a Facebook initiative to provide "free" internet access to developing countries through a portal that privileged Facebook's own services and Facebook-approved content over the open web. A coalition of sixty-five organisations in thirty-one countries, led by Indian digital-rights activists under the "Save the Internet" campaign banner, named Internet.org as a form of digital colonialism — arguing that a US corporation's controlled, paternalistic partial-internet-for-the-poor was structurally equivalent to colonial dependency — and forced the programme's shutdown in India in 2016. The Guatemalan human rights lawyer and digital rights activist Renata Avila, writing in the 2018 Sur: International Journal on Human Rights essay "Digital Sovereignty or Digital Colonialism?", synthesised this civil-society practitioner tradition into a full-scale structural critique: digital colonialism as "a new, quasi imperial power structure imposed by dominant powers over a large number of people without their consent" — and digital sovereignty, the right of peoples and states to own, shape, and govern their digital infrastructure and data flows, as the counter-demand.

The academic axis ran through Michael Kwet's 2019 Race & Class paper "Digital colonialism: US empire and the new imperialism in the Global South", which argued that US technology corporations constitute "a twenty-first century form of colonization" of the Global South through three interlocking mechanisms: control of software and cloud infrastructure (operating systems, office software, cloud storage — each an extraction surface and a dependency point); data extraction (the appropriation of the digital activity of Global South populations as raw material for US corporate platforms); and the embedding of US commercial and political interests into the digital infrastructure of formerly colonised nations through pricing power, terms-of-service imposition, and regulatory capture. Kwet used South Africa as the primary case study, observing that colonialism there "now arrives with cloud services, proprietary software and algorithmic governance — each serving to deepen the country's dependence on Western technological infrastructures." A 2025 Journal of Communication intellectual history of the framing documents that publications drawing on digital colonialism as a framework increased by nearly 2,000% from 2018 to 2023, spanning sociology, communication studies, legal scholarship, and international relations — marking the framing's shift from activist vocabulary to cross-disciplinary analytical lens.

Propagation into civil-society AI governance

The framing's AI governance register runs through two interlocking channels.

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC), the international civil-society network anchoring the global digital-rights field, has named "rising new forms of digital and data colonialism" as a central concern of its internet governance advocacy. In its 2018 analysis "Decolonising internet governance", APC reframes internet governance beyond technical issues to "deeply political aspects" — asking whose interests the internet serves and demanding a decolonial approach that addresses the unequal development narrative built around connectivity-as-progress metrics. APC's participation in the UN Global Digital Compact (GDC) negotiations (2023–2024) carried this framing into the primary multilateral AI governance process of the period, where the digital-colonialism register was deployed to argue that AI governance norms being developed by OECD, EU, and G7 working groups will produce structural AI colonialism through cultural imposition (exporting Western AI frameworks to the periphery as universal standards) and hermeneutical injustice (structurally disqualifying Global South citizens as legitimate knowledge-makers in AI governance).

SMEX, the Beirut-headquartered digital-rights organisation anchoring the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) digital rights field, carries the framing into its annual Bread&Net unconference — the primary civil-society convening surface for the Arabic-speaking world's engagement with digital rights. At Bread&Net 2025, 620 participants from 39 countries worked explicitly with "AI imperialism" and "neocolonialism" as analytical categories in sessions on AI governance, surveillance, and corporate power — framing AI as "part of a political infrastructure emanating from power and control" and situating digital repression in the MENA region "within broader hierarchies of control rooted in colonial legacies, geopolitical dominance, and capitalist extraction." The Bread&Net framing names the MENA AI governance gap directly: AI systems that moderate Arabic-language speech at lower quality than English, facial recognition and surveillance technology deployed by authoritarian states using Global North AI infrastructure, and AI governance discussions at ITU and UNESCO that proceed without meaningful Arabic-speaking civil-society participation.

The GDC, adopted at the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024, became the primary multilateral arena where the digital-colonialism framing was operationalised into AI governance demands. The Global South bloc's central position — meaningful participation in AI governance standard-setting, not consultation after norms are set — repeated, in the AI era, the structural argument the 1970s NWICO debates first made about broadcasting and communications.

How it differs from adjacent framings

Three features distinguish digital colonialism from the data colonialism and algorithmic colonialism framings with which it most directly overlaps.

First, digital colonialism is full-stack where the adjacent framings are mechanism-specific. Data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias, carried by Derechos Digitales and Coding Rights) names the conversion of human life into data as the primary extraction mechanism; algorithmic colonialism (Birhane) names the AI-and-corporate specificity of that mechanism on the African continent. Digital colonialism names the entire digital infrastructure — physical cables, cloud architecture, platform governance, AI systems, and the governance norms being written about all of them — as a single structural colonial order, with no mechanism excluded.

Second, digital colonialism is governance-centred where the adjacent framings are harm-centred. Its primary political demand is transformation of the conditions under which digital and AI governance norms are made — meaningful Global South participation in standard-setting at UNESCO, ITU, the Internet Governance Forum, and the GDC — rather than remediation of specific harms. The framing argues that as long as the governance process is itself colonial (norms set by OECD/G7, exported as universal), harm remediation will remain structurally inadequate.

Third, digital colonialism is Global-South-general rather than region-specific. Where data colonialism's primary public life is in Latin America and algorithmic colonialism's is on the African continent and in the African diaspora, digital colonialism operates as a structural claim across the entire Global South — though it has particular urgency in MENA, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, where the gap between the density of Global North digital infrastructure in governance and the absence of Arabic-, Hindi-, or Swahili-speaking civil-society voices from AI governance norm-setting is most acute.

What the framing demands

The demand structure digital colonialism carries is threefold. First, infrastructure sovereignty: the right of nations and communities in the Global South to own or govern the physical and software infrastructure on which their digital lives depend — undersea cables, cloud services, operating systems, platform algorithms. Second, data sovereignty: the right to determine how population-level data is collected, stored, processed, and monetised — including the indigenous data sovereignty demand that First Nations and indigenous communities exercise collective governance over data about their own communities. Third, governance sovereignty: meaningful participation — not consultation — in the multilateral processes that set the technical and normative standards governing AI, the internet, and digital platforms. The third demand is where the framing's AI governance register is most consequential: the argument is not that Global South nations should be consulted on AI governance norms written elsewhere, but that the norm-setting process itself should be structurally transformed so that Global South knowledge systems are recognised as legitimate inputs, not peripheral annexes.

The framing's limit, visible across the same record, is that the structural-and-governance register has not generated the campaign slogans, hashtags, or protest-line vocabulary that adjacent framings like #KeepItOn or #BanTheScan carry. Digital colonialism's working life is the policy-advocacy and academic-substantive register — the IGF session, the GDC submission, the civil-society letter — rather than the street-protest or campaign register. The framing's function in the corpus turns on its role as the structural interpretive layer through which the Global South — and particularly MENA civil society — reads AI governance as a domain of colonial power requiring structural transformation, not incremental reform.