From Cloud Servers to Cobalt Mines: How the Digital Economy Risks Repeating Old Empires in Invisible Ways

This article examines the rise of “digital” and “data colonialism” and asks whether the emerging AI-driven digital economy is reproducing old colonial patterns in new forms.

Based on UNCTAD’s Digital Economy Report 2024, the African Union’s Data Policy Framework, UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, and recent studies on data colonialism and digital sovereignty, it describes how platforms and Big Tech companies take value from data in the Global South, why many researchers see this as a new type of extractivism, and what policy solutions—like regional data spaces, AI ethics, and competition law—are being suggested.

The article includes tables comparing traditional resource colonialism with data colonialism and maps key initiatives to build a more just digital order.

1. From Gold and Rubber to Data and Clicks

For centuries, colonial power was visible: ships arriving, borders redrawn, resources extracted. Today, a growing number of scholars argue that a new form of colonialism is unfolding—not over land, but over data.

Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejías famously describe this as “data colonialism”: a new social order in which continuous extraction of data from human life becomes the basis of economic power, echoing but not identical to earlier colonial eras.

The basic idea is simple:

Our movements, messages, purchases, biometrics, school records, farm yields, hospital files, and even brain signals are turned into data, aggregated and analysed—mostly by a small number of firms headquartered in the Global North or in China.

UNCTAD’s Digital Economy Report 2024 notes that the digital economy is now a major driver of global trade and investment, but benefits remain highly concentrated, with a few countries and corporations dominating data flows, cloud infrastructure, and AI capabilities.

This raises a blunt question:

Who will own, control, and benefit from the data of the Global South in the age of AI?

2. What Is “Data Colonialism”?

While definitions vary, a common thread in the literature is that data colonialism:

• Treats data—about individuals, communities, and environments—as a resource to be extracted with minimal consent, compensation, or accountability.
• Relies on asymmetric power: a handful of Big Tech platforms and cloud providers set the rules, while users and states in the Global South have limited bargaining power.
• Extends colonial logics into the digital realm: mapping, classification, surveillance, and control of populations through data infrastructures.

A helpful way to see the analogy is to compare “old” resource colonialism with the emerging data regime.

Table 1. From Resource Colonialism to Data Colonialism

Scholars like Tarik Nothias argue that we are seeing “a new stage in the history of colonialism and capitalism: the age of data colonialism,” not as a perfect repetition of the past, but as a structural continuation of unequal extraction.

3. The Global South in an Unequal Digital Economy

UNCTAD’s facts and figures on the digital economy highlight stark inequalities:

• A small number of countries host the majority of hyperscale data centres, control cross-border data flows, and dominate digital platforms in e-commerce, search, and social media.
• Investment in digital infrastructure is surging, but remains uneven, with many African, Latin American, and South Asian countries heavily dependent on foreign platforms and cloud services.

Meanwhile, the environmental footprint of digitalization—energy for data centres, raw materials for devices, e-waste—falls disproportionately on resource-rich but institutionally weaker regions, echoing patterns seen in the Congo Basin and other extractive frontiers.

These asymmetries have led policymakers and analysts to push for “digital sovereignty” in the Global South: the capacity to define rules for data, digital infrastructures, and AI that serve local development and human rights.

4. Data Colonialism in Practice: How It Shows Up

Data colonialism is not just a theory; it shows up in very concrete ways.

4.1 Platform Dependence and Value Capture

Many African and Asian small businesses rely on global platforms for payments, logistics, advertising, and marketplaces. While these services bring benefits, they also mean that:

• Transaction and behavioural data about consumers and firms are captured by platform owners.
• Local firms and regulators often do not have full access to these datasets, limiting their ability to build competing services or inform policy.

4.2 Public Sector Digitalization without Local Control

Governments in the Global South increasingly partner with large tech firms to manage:

• Digital ID systems;
• Tax collection;
• Smart-city infrastructure;
• Health and education platforms.

Without robust contracts and data-governance frameworks, there is a risk that core state functions become entangled with proprietary foreign systems, making it difficult to switch providers and raising questions about who ultimately controls citizen data.

4.3 AI Models Trained on Global South Data

AI systems are often trained on massive datasets scraped from the web, including social media, news, and cultural content produced in the Global South.

Critics ask:

• Who gave consent for this?
• Who benefits when AI models, trained partly on Southern data, are commercialized by Northern firms?

UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, adopted by all 194 member states in 2021, explicitly highlights the need to consider the Global South and sustainability in AI governance, calling for transparency, fairness, and human rights protections.

5. Policy Responses: Data Sovereignty and Regional Frameworks

Despite these challenges, the Global South is not passive. Several important policy initiatives aim to reshape the rules of the digital game.

5.1 UNCTAD and a Just Digital Order

UNCTAD’s Digital Economy Report 2024 calls for:

• Inclusive data governance, ensuring that data and digitalization support the Sustainable Development Goals.
• Global cooperation under the emerging Global Digital Compact on issues like cross-border data flows, competition, and environmental impacts of digitalization.

UNCTAD also emphasizes the need for better statistics and transparency on digital trade, data flows, and environmental footprints to inform policy.

5.2 African Union: Toward a Shared Data Space

The African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020–2030) and the AU Data Policy Framework outline a vision for:

• A shared African data space with harmonized rules;
• Stronger data protection and privacy laws;
• Use of data to support intra-African digital trade under the AfCFTA;
• Localization and security of critical data.

The goal is not isolation, but strategic openness: enabling cross-border data flows within rules that protect rights, foster innovation, and prevent exploitative extraction.

5.3 Global AI and Neurotechnology Ethics

UNESCO’s Recommendation on AI ethics provides a global normative baseline:

• It insists on human rights, human oversight, transparency, and fairness in AI.
• It calls for special attention to marginalized groups and the Global South.

More recently, UNESCO has adopted global standards on the ethics of neurotechnology, introducing the category of “neural data” and calling for protections for mental privacy and cognitive freedom—a reminder that data colonialism may soon extend from our phones to our brains if rules are not in place.

6. Scholars and Critics: Debating the “Colonial” Analogy

Not everyone agrees on the term “data colonialism.”

• Some authors, such as Couldry and Mejías, argue that it captures a structural continuity between old and new forms of extraction and control.
• Others caution that the analogy can be overused, suggesting instead that we speak of “neo-extractivism” or “platform capitalism” without collapsing differences between historical conquest and today’s digital regimes.

Policy-oriented papers—like those from the Policy Center for the New South—propose a more pragmatic framing of “digital sovereignty”, focusing on concrete tools: competition policy, data protection, public procurement rules, and investment in local digital industries.

Whatever term we use, there is broad agreement that unchecked concentration of digital power in a few corporate and national hands is incompatible with democratic development in the Global South.

7. Building a Fairer Digital Future: Key Principles

To avoid a new round of digital dependency, many experts suggest a mix of national, regional, and global measures.

Table 2. Building a Just Digital Order: Policy Levers

At the same time, civil society and academia have crucial roles to play: researching impacts, advocating rights, and imagining alternatives (public-interest data trusts, community networks, open science).

8. From Extraction to Empowerment

The 21st century will likely be remembered as the age when data became a central resource of power. Whether it also becomes the age of data colonialism or of digital justice will depend on choices made now—by governments, companies, and citizens.

For countries in the Global South, the stakes are especially high. If they accept default settings designed in distant boardrooms, they risk remaining raw-data exporters in a world where the real value lies in AI models, platforms, and intellectual property. If they assert digital sovereignty wisely—through regional cooperation, rights-based regulation, and investment in local capabilities—they can turn data into a public good and a development asset, not a new frontier of exploitation.

The choice is not between connectivity and control, or between innovation and rights. The real choice is between:

• A digital order where a few actors own the future’s data; or
• A digital commons in which all societies can shape, govern, and benefit from the information that emerges from their lives.

Suggested Further Readings:

African Union. (2022). Data Policy Framework. African Union Commission.
https://au.int/en/documents/au-data-policy-framework

Couldry, N., & Mejías, U. A. (2019). The costs of connection: How data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. Stanford University Press. See also: “Data colonialism brings about a new social order.”
https://projects.itforchange.net/state-of-big-tech/data-colonialism-brings-about-a-new-social-order/

Nothias, T. (2025). An intellectual history of digital colonialism. Journal of Communication.
(Article abstract and details available via Oxford Academic.)

UNCTAD. (2024). Digital Economy Report 2024: Shaping an environmentally sustainable and inclusive digital future. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
https://unctad.org/publication/digital-economy-report-2024

UNESCO. (2021). Recommendation on the ethics of artificial intelligence. UNESCO.
https://www.unesco.org/en/artificial-intelligence/ethics

Policy Center for the New South. (2025). Digital sovereignty and data colonialism: Shaping a just digital order for the Global South.
https://www.policycenter.ma/publications/digital-sovereignty-and-data-colonialism-shaping-just-digital-order-global-south