Decolonizing the Internet
- NOTOC**
Decolonizing the Internet and Digital Sovereignty
The internet is often described as a borderless and decentralized space, but its infrastructure, platforms, data systems, standards, and economic benefits are controlled by a relatively small number of governments and corporations. The concept of digital colonialism describes how these concentrations of power can reproduce older colonial relationships through the extraction of data, labor, natural resources, cultural knowledge, and economic value.
Decolonizing the internet means more than increasing access to existing technologies. It involves changing who owns digital infrastructure, who establishes technical standards, whose languages and knowledge systems are represented, who benefits economically, and which communities have authority over their data and technological futures. The related idea of digital sovereignty concerns the ability of nations, communities, and individuals to exercise meaningful control over digital systems that affect their lives.
Understanding Digital Colonialism
Digital colonialism refers to the extension of political, economic, and cultural domination through digital technologies. Instead of acquiring territory directly, powerful actors can gain control through software platforms, cloud services, telecommunications networks, artificial-intelligence systems, intellectual property, technical standards, and the continuous collection of user data.
Data colonialism treats human activity as a resource that can be captured, analyzed, and converted into commercial value. Online searches, communications, purchases, movements, relationships, and cultural expressions are collected by platforms and used to develop advertising systems, predictive models, surveillance technologies, and artificial intelligence.
This extraction is unequal. People and communities may provide the data, labor, minerals, land, electricity, water, and cultural knowledge that sustain digital systems while ownership, profits, computational capacity, and decision-making authority remain concentrated elsewhere.
Platform imperialism describes the influence exercised by companies that control search engines, social networks, operating systems, application stores, cloud infrastructure, advertising markets, and digital-payment systems. Their platforms can become essential public spaces even though their rules are privately written and enforced.
Digital colonialism also has an epistemic dimension. Search engines, databases, artificial-intelligence models, and online encyclopedias influence what information becomes visible, authoritative, or searchable. Knowledge that is oral, Indigenous, local, unpublished, or expressed in less widely supported languages is often excluded or misrepresented.
Digital Sovereignty and Internet Governance
Digital sovereignty is the capacity to make independent and accountable decisions about data, infrastructure, software, cybersecurity, platforms, artificial intelligence, and technological development. It may apply to states, regions, Indigenous nations, local communities, public institutions, or individuals.
National digital-sovereignty strategies commonly include data-protection laws, local data storage, sovereign cloud services, domestic technological industries, cybersecurity capacity, public digital infrastructure, open standards, competition policy, and investment in technical education.
Sovereignty, however, is not automatically democratic. Governments can invoke it to justify censorship, surveillance, internet shutdowns, data localization, or greater control over political speech. A decolonial approach therefore connects sovereignty with human rights, public accountability, community participation, freedom of expression, privacy, and meaningful consent.
Global South countries face difficult choices when developing digital infrastructure. Foreign investment can expand connectivity and computational capacity, but it can also produce vendor lock-in, external control, debt, surveillance risks, and long-term dependency. Replacing dependence on one powerful country or corporation with dependence on another does not necessarily produce technological self-determination.
Regional cooperation can strengthen sovereignty by allowing countries to share infrastructure, technical expertise, research capacity, regulatory standards, and negotiating power. African, Latin American, Asian, and other regional institutions can help prevent individual countries from facing dominant technology companies alone.
Africa and the Global South
Africa occupies a central place in debates about digital colonialism. Foreign companies control significant portions of the continent’s platforms, cloud services, telecommunications equipment, data centers, artificial-intelligence supply chains, and online advertising markets.
African data may be collected locally but stored, processed, and monetized abroad. This limits the ability of African governments, researchers, businesses, and communities to determine how the data is used or to capture its economic value.
Infrastructure investment can expand access while reproducing unequal relationships. Privately controlled undersea cables, cloud facilities, satellite systems, and telecommunications networks can create dependency on foreign corporations for essential communications and public services.
Platform policies are frequently designed around North American or European languages, political conditions, and legal systems. Content moderation may fail to understand African languages, historical conflicts, cultural references, or rapidly changing political contexts. This can allow hate speech and disinformation to spread while legitimate political and cultural expression is incorrectly removed.
The history of Facebook’s Free Basics program illustrates the tension between connectivity and control. Although the service offered limited free access, critics argued that it presented a corporate selection of websites as the internet, weakened net-neutrality principles, and encouraged long-term dependence on one platform.
A decolonial approach to African digital development centers local institutions, public-interest infrastructure, African languages, regional cooperation, community participation, technical education, and the ability to create rather than merely consume technology.
Similar concerns appear across Asia and Latin America. Data-localization rules, sovereign clouds, smart-city projects, national digital-identity systems, Chinese telecommunications investment, and United States-based platforms can all expand capacity while creating new forms of dependency.
Artificial Intelligence, Data Extraction, and Digital Labor
Artificial intelligence has intensified concerns about digital colonialism because AI systems require large quantities of data, computing power, energy, minerals, water, and human labor. Much of this input comes from the Global South, while the most valuable models and infrastructure remain controlled by corporations based in wealthier countries.
Training data can include languages, images, artwork, stories, traditional knowledge, and cultural expressions gathered without meaningful consent. Generative AI may reproduce or commercialize this material without attribution, compensation, or respect for cultural restrictions.
Artificial-intelligence systems can also reproduce colonial categories and social hierarchies. Models trained on historically unequal records may reinforce discrimination in education, employment, policing, immigration, credit, health care, and public administration.
The apparently automated AI economy depends heavily on human workers. Data labelers, content moderators, translators, testers, and reviewers classify images, filter violent material, correct model outputs, and prepare training datasets. Many of these workers are employed through outsourcing companies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other lower-wage regions.
Content moderators may be exposed to disturbing material while receiving inadequate pay, psychological support, job security, or recognition. Decolonizing artificial intelligence therefore requires labor protections, transparent supply chains, collective bargaining rights, worker participation, and a fairer distribution of the wealth created by AI.
A decolonial model of AI development would give affected communities authority over research goals, datasets, system design, evaluation, deployment, and benefit sharing. It would also recognize multiple knowledge systems rather than treating Western technical standards as universally neutral.
Infrastructure, Clouds, Cables, and Environmental Costs
Digital technologies depend on physical infrastructure. Undersea cables, terrestrial fiber, satellites, data centers, semiconductor factories, electrical grids, mines, cooling systems, and warehouses form the material foundation of the internet and artificial intelligence.
The metaphor of the “cloud” can conceal this physical reality. Data centers require land, large quantities of electricity, cooling water, construction materials, and reliable access to communications networks. Their environmental costs may be concentrated in communities that receive relatively few of their economic benefits.
The rapid construction of AI data centers raises questions about water scarcity, energy consumption, carbon emissions, land use, public subsidies, and competition with local needs. Sovereign AI projects can reproduce extractive development if infrastructure is built without environmental safeguards or community participation.
Undersea cables carry most international data traffic. Their routes, landing stations, ownership structures, and repair systems create strategic chokepoints. Countries may possess internet access while remaining dependent on foreign companies to carry, route, store, or secure their communications.
Country-code internet domains such as .tv, .io, .ly, and .nu also reveal colonial legacies. Valuable digital resources associated with territories or small states have sometimes been commercialized by outside organizations, creating disputes over consent, ownership, and the distribution of revenue.
Digital sovereignty therefore requires attention not only to data laws and software but also to cables, energy systems, cloud contracts, domain names, spectrum, semiconductor supply chains, and the environmental conditions supporting digital life.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty
Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of Indigenous peoples to govern the collection, ownership, storage, interpretation, access, and use of data relating to their communities, lands, languages, cultures, and knowledge.
Conventional data-governance systems frequently emphasize individual consent and institutional ownership. Indigenous frameworks may instead recognize collective rights, intergenerational responsibilities, relationships to land, cultural protocols, and community authority.
Historical research often removed biological samples, recordings, photographs, stories, environmental information, and cultural objects from Indigenous communities. Modern databases and artificial-intelligence systems can continue this practice by digitizing and reusing Indigenous knowledge without permission or benefit sharing.
Indigenous communities are developing their own servers, archives, language technologies, governance agreements, research protocols, and data institutions. These initiatives allow communities to determine who may access particular information and how it should be interpreted.
The CARE Principles—Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics—provide an Indigenous-centered alternative to data frameworks that focus mainly on making information findable and reusable. They emphasize that accessibility must not override community rights.
Digital repatriation can return access and curatorial authority over recordings, images, documents, and other materials held by museums, universities, governments, or corporations. However, simply placing material online is not enough if the originating community cannot control its description, circulation, or reuse.
Languages, Knowledge, and Wikipedia
Language inequality is one of the internet’s most persistent forms of exclusion. English and a limited number of other dominant languages receive far greater investment in software, keyboards, search tools, speech recognition, translation, educational resources, and artificial intelligence.
Speakers of digitally disadvantaged languages may face missing characters, poor translation, inaccurate speech recognition, limited content moderation, higher computational costs, and fewer online services. Some African languages are more expensive to process in language models because tokenization systems divide their words into inefficient units.
Artificial-intelligence models trained primarily on dominant-language internet content cannot represent the full diversity of human knowledge. Oral traditions, local publications, community archives, Indigenous knowledge, and information behind paywalls may be absent from training datasets.
Language technologies can support revitalization when communities control their design, data, and goals. Community-led speech recognition, translation, text-to-speech systems, dictionaries, archives, and educational tools can strengthen languages without surrendering cultural authority.
Wikipedia and Wikidata illustrate both the possibilities and limitations of collaborative knowledge production. Their open and nonprofit structures provide alternatives to commercial platforms, but their content still reflects inequalities in internet access, available sources, editor participation, geography, gender, and language.
Policies requiring published sources may disadvantage oral and Indigenous knowledge systems. English Wikipedia can also be incorrectly treated as a complete global reference even when other language editions contain different facts, perspectives, and locally relevant knowledge.
Decolonizing online knowledge requires supporting non-English editions, community archives, oral citations, local researchers, culturally appropriate metadata, and participation by communities historically excluded from digital institutions.
Platforms, Connectivity, and Net Neutrality
Expanding internet access does not automatically produce digital justice. People can be connected while remaining subject to surveillance, exploitative pricing, platform dependency, discriminatory algorithms, unsafe working conditions, or restricted access to information.
Net neutrality seeks to prevent internet-service providers from favoring selected websites or services. Zero-rating programs that provide free access to particular platforms can help some users connect, but they may also allow corporations to decide which parts of the internet are affordable or visible.
Global platforms frequently devote fewer resources to content moderation, safety, language support, and political analysis in countries they consider peripheral markets. This can deepen the effects of hate speech, fraud, political manipulation, and disinformation.
National efforts to regulate platforms can increase accountability, but they can also expand government control over speech and surveillance. Democratic internet governance must balance platform accountability, public safety, privacy, competition, freedom of expression, and protection from state abuse.
Wikipedia offers a contrasting model because it is nonprofit, volunteer-governed, and structured around shared knowledge rather than advertising. Nevertheless, unequal time, income, connectivity, education, and access to sources still determine who can participate in editing and whose knowledge is documented.
Feminist, Community, and Open Alternatives
Feminist approaches connect digital colonialism with patriarchy, racism, class inequality, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and other systems of power. They emphasize consent, bodily autonomy, care, accessibility, freedom of expression, and protection from technology-facilitated violence.
A feminist internet is not defined only by technical access. It requires that marginalized people be able to participate safely, represent themselves, organize politically, create knowledge, and influence the design and governance of digital systems.
Community networks provide locally owned and governed alternatives to commercial connectivity. Communities can build wireless networks, fiber systems, local servers, and shared digital services designed around local needs rather than distant corporate priorities.
Free and open-source software can strengthen sovereignty by allowing users and institutions to inspect, modify, share, and host their own software. Open standards and interoperability reduce vendor lock-in and make it easier to move information between systems.
Public digital infrastructure can provide essential services without making citizens dependent on advertising-based platforms. To remain democratic, however, public systems need strong privacy protections, transparent governance, public oversight, accessibility, and meaningful avenues for participation.
Decentralized technologies alone do not guarantee decolonization. Technical alternatives must be accompanied by changes in ownership, funding, labor conditions, institutional culture, knowledge production, and decision-making authority.
Paths Toward a Decolonized Internet
Decolonizing the internet requires coordinated action across technology, law, education, culture, labor, and public policy. Important strategies include:
- Building publicly accountable and community-controlled digital infrastructure.
- Supporting regional cooperation and South-South technological partnerships.
- Enforcing privacy, competition, labor, environmental, and data-protection laws.
- Expanding local cloud, research, cybersecurity, and computational capacity.
- Protecting Indigenous and community authority over cultural and linguistic data.
- Funding technology for African, Indigenous, minority, and other underrepresented languages.
- Requiring transparency in artificial-intelligence datasets and labor supply chains.
- Supporting open-source software, open standards, interoperability, and the right to repair.
- Strengthening worker rights for content moderators, data labelers, and other digital laborers.
- Including affected communities in the design, evaluation, and governance of technology.
- Preventing digital-sovereignty policies from becoming tools for censorship or surveillance.
- Measuring technological development by public benefit rather than connectivity or investment alone.
Conclusion
Decolonizing the internet is a struggle over ownership, authority, representation, labor, infrastructure, and knowledge. It challenges the assumption that technological expansion is automatically liberating and asks who controls digital systems, who supplies their resources, who receives their benefits, and who bears their risks.
Digital sovereignty can help nations and communities reduce dependency, but sovereignty must be democratic, rights-based, environmentally responsible, and accountable to the people most affected. National control alone is insufficient when governments reproduce surveillance, exclusion, or centralized power.
A genuinely decolonized internet would be multilingual, pluralistic, interoperable, community-centered, and governed as a shared public resource. It would recognize Indigenous authority, protect workers, support local innovation, respect cultural knowledge, and distribute technological power more equitably across the world.
- TOC**
Foundations and Core Concepts
Digital Sovereignty: The Global South’s Predicament and How to Measure It
Introduces an index for measuring digital dependency and argues that control of data, platforms, infrastructure, and standards has become a central sovereignty question.
Navigating Digital Colonialism: Sovereignty Models and Sustainable Development Pathways for the Global South
| Y. Liu et al. | ScienceDirect | 2026
Compares sovereignty strategies available to Global South countries facing technological dependency, regulatory pressure, infrastructure concentration, and externally controlled data extraction.
Digital Sovereignty and Data Colonialism: Shaping a Just Digital Order for the Global South
| Marcus Vinícius de Freitas | Policy Center for the New South | October 2025
Defines digital colonialism as a structural challenge and proposes sovereignty strategies involving infrastructure, regulation, local innovation, and South-South cooperation.
The Origins of Digital Colonialism
| Özgür Yılmaz | İmgelem | July 2025
Reviews the economic, technological, epistemic, and cultural structures through which contemporary digital systems reproduce older colonial hierarchies.
Countering Digital Colonialism
| Carme Colomina | CCCB Lab | 25 February 2025
Examines data extractivism and technological dependence in the Global South and surveys emerging ideas for democratic digital self-governance.
An Intellectual History of Digital Colonialism
| Toussaint Nothias | Journal of Communication | 2025
Traces the historical roots and rapid growth of digital-colonialism scholarship while highlighting the foundational role of Global South activists and thinkers.
Digital Colonialism: The Global South Facing Closed Technological Hegemony
| Al Jazeera Media Institute | Al Jazeera Media Institute | 31 December 2024
Connects control of software, hardware, infrastructure, data, and digital labor to a wider system of technological hegemony.
Addressing Digital Colonialism: A Path to Equitable Data Governance
| Bitange Ndemo | UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab | 8 August 2024
Calls for equitable data governance that reduces North-South asymmetries and gives African institutions greater authority over data and digital development.
Decolonising the Internet: An Introduction to the #AoIR2022 Special Issue
| Andrew Iliadis et al. | Information, Communication & Society | 2023
Introduces scholarship examining how colonial histories shape internet research, platforms, data practices, infrastructures, governance, and resistance.
How to Fight Digital Colonialism
| Toussaint Nothias | Boston Review | 14 November 2022
Profiles Global South organizers developing political language, public campaigns, and transnational alliances to challenge Big Tech extraction.
Decolonizing the Internet by Decolonizing Ourselves
| Anasuya Sengupta et al. | Global Perspectives | 23 March 2021
Describes feminist and anti-colonial practices for transforming organizational design, metrics, partnerships, and knowledge production within internet-justice work.
Digital Colonialism: The Evolution of US Empire
| Michael Kwet | Transnational Institute | 4 March 2021
Explains how domination of software, hardware, cloud systems, and network connectivity extends US corporate power throughout the global digital economy.
US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South
| Michael Kwet | Race & Class | 2019
Develops a framework for understanding digital colonialism through corporate control of the architecture, ownership, and political economy of technology.
Making Data Colonialism Liveable: How Might Data’s Social Order Be Regulated?
| Nick Couldry | Internet Policy Review | 2019
Explores the social order created by continuous data collection and asks what forms of regulation could restrain its extractive logic.
Digital Colonialism: The 21st Century Scramble for Africa through the Extraction and Control of User Data and the Limitations of Data Protection Laws
| Danielle Coleman | Michigan Journal of Race & Law | 2019
Examines how technology firms extract African user data while existing privacy and data-protection rules struggle to prevent unequal value capture.
Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject
| Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias | Television & New Media | 2019
Argues that routine data extraction appropriates human life for profit in ways comparable to colonial appropriation of land and resources.
Prolegomenon to the Decolonization of Internet Governance
| Syed Mustafa Ali | Open University | 2018
Calls for internet governance of, by, and for the Global South rather than simple inclusion within Northern-designed institutions.
Decolonizing the Internet: 2018 Summary Report
| Whose Knowledge? | Whose Knowledge? | 2018
Documents collective discussions on knowledge justice, representation, language, design, infrastructure, and leadership by marginalized communities.
The Construction of Platform Imperialism in the Globalization Era
| Dal Yong Jin | tripleC | 2013
Introduces platform imperialism as a framework for analyzing global expansion, capital accumulation, intellectual property, and cultural power.
Decolonizing the Internet
| Whose Knowledge? | Whose Knowledge? | n.d.
Outlines a movement to rebuild the internet around marginalized communities, plural knowledge systems, feminist practice, and shared authority.
Governance, Sovereignty, and Law
The Environmental Cost of Digital Sovereignty
| Muntaser Syed et al. | arXiv | 15 July 2026
Examines the water, electricity, emissions, and climate risks associated with sovereign AI infrastructure in resource-constrained Global South settings.
Advancing Regional Digital Sovereignty: Policy Responses to AI-Driven Data Colonialism in Africa
| On Policy Africa | On Policy Africa | 16 June 2026
Recommends coordinated African policies for local data control, public infrastructure, regional innovation, and accountable AI governance.
Digital Colonialism and Inclusion in Africa’s Technological Future
| KMCO Advocates | KMCO Advocates | 16 February 2026
Reviews foreign technological dominance in Africa and proposes legal, institutional, educational, and infrastructure responses.
Digital Sovereignty and the Political Economy of Latin American Platformization
| Gianmarco Cristofari | Institute of Network Cultures | 21 January 2026
Explores Latin American platform dependency, state power, labor, public alternatives, and the tensions within national-sovereignty projects.
Digital Sovereignty in the Global South: Autonomy in a Digitally Dependent World
| G. Mekonnen et al. | Procedia Computer Science | 2026
Analyzes sovereignty as a combination of technical capacity, legal authority, economic autonomy, and culturally appropriate digital development.
Policies for Advancing Digital Sovereignty in Latin America
| University College London | UCL Bartlett | August 2025
Frames regional cooperation, public capacity, infrastructure ownership, and aligned regulation as defenses against permanent digital dependency.
Digital Sovereignty: The End of the Open Internet as We Know It?
| DiploFoundation | DiploFoundation | 3 April 2025
Explains competing meanings of digital sovereignty and the risks of conflating democratic autonomy with state censorship or fragmentation.
Southeast Asia’s Quest for Digital Sovereignty
| Vasundhara Rana | The Diplomat | 19 March 2025
Surveys ASEAN data-localization policies, sovereign-cloud plans, regional cooperation, and concerns that data value flows offshore.
Data Sovereignty and the Global South’s Resistance to Digital Colonialism
| O. J. Egungbemi | SSRN | 2025
Compares Nigeria, India, and Brazil to assess regulation, digital commons, infrastructure, and civil-society strategies for reclaiming autonomy.
Can the Internet Be Governed?
| Daniel Immerwahr | The New Yorker | 5 February 2024
Reviews competing US, Chinese, European, and Indian approaches to regulating platforms, networks, public infrastructure, and digital markets.
Resisting and Claiming Digital Sovereignty: The Cases of Indigenous Peoples and Refugees
| Stéphane Couture et al. | Policy & Internet | 2024
Compares community efforts to control data, identity, infrastructure, connectivity, and technological decision-making beyond state-centered sovereignty.
An Alternative Planetary Future? Digital Sovereignty Frameworks and the Decolonial Option
| Sebastián Lehuedé | Big Data & Society | 2024
Tests whether state and civil-society sovereignty projects transform digital power or merely replace the actors benefiting from existing systems.
Digital Sovereignty Strategies for Every Nation
| Ali Shoker | arXiv | 4 July 2023
Proposes a strategic framework for controlling digital assets, operational resources, expertise, research, and international dependencies.
Global Approaches to Digital Sovereignty
Compares US, Chinese, European, and African understandings of sovereignty in data governance, cybersecurity, industry, infrastructure, and human rights.
Is Africa’s Governance Charter Fit for the Digital Era?
| Enrique Domingo and colleagues | ECDPM | 2022
Assesses how African democratic frameworks should respond to surveillance, disinformation, internet shutdowns, platform power, and unequal access.
Digital Sovereignty
| Julia Pohle and Thorsten Thiel | Internet Policy Review | 2020
Traces the evolution of digital sovereignty as a policy concept and distinguishes state, individual, and community-centered approaches.
Internet Governance in the Global South
| Daniel Oppermann | NUPRI-USP | 2018
Places internet governance within histories of Bandung, nonalignment, surveillance, cultural imperialism, and Global South demands for institutional reform.
Digital Sovereignty or Digital Colonialism?
| Renata Ávila | Sur – International Journal on Human Rights | 2018
Advocates regional, national, and community control of communications infrastructure as a foundation for privacy, autonomy, and democratic participation.
African Declaration on Internet Governance
| African Union | African Union | 13 February 2017
Sets out African priorities for inclusive knowledge societies, human development, security, rights, access, and participation in global internet governance.
African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms
| African Declaration Coalition | African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms | 2014
Provides an African human-rights framework covering access, expression, privacy, culture, language, equality, governance, and network neutrality.
Africa and Digital Colonialism
Decolonizing Digital Access in Sub-Saharan Africa
| Authors in Research Handbook on Digital Sociology | Edward Elgar | 18 June 2026
Argues that digital access policy must move beyond a savior model and center African priorities, institutions, knowledge, and community agency.
Africanising and Decolonising Content Moderation in the Digital Civic Space
| Digital Rights Alliance Africa | Digital Rights Alliance Africa | 14 April 2026
Calls for moderation systems built around African languages, histories, legal contexts, conflict dynamics, and locally accountable decision-making.
Digital Colonialism Is the New Scramble for Africa
| E-International Relations contributor | E-International Relations | 12 January 2026
Compares the contemporary mapping and extraction of African digital resources with earlier territorial partition and resource exploitation.
Resisting Digital Colonialism and Protecting Subaltern Agency in Africa
| Sena Ayesu | Journal of Public and International Affairs | 2026
Examines how foreign platforms, infrastructure, surveillance, and regulatory models constrain African autonomy and proposes subaltern-centered governance.
Tech Colonialism: Who Really Owns Africa’s Data?
| Paschal Okpupas | Paschal Okpupas | 8 November 2025
Reviews where African data is stored and monetized and proposes stronger local infrastructure, rules, institutions, and public awareness.
Africa’s Digital Sovereignty Trap: The Data Center Dilemma
| Iginio Gagliardone and colleagues | New America | 30 July 2025
Examines how US and Chinese infrastructure investment can expand capacity while deepening dependency, vendor lock-in, and geopolitical vulnerability.
African Digital Colonialism Is the New Face of Worker Exploitation
| Wayan Vota | ICTworks | 17 April 2025
Connects data labeling, content moderation, mineral extraction, platform labor, and foreign ownership to unequal value capture in Africa.
Digital Colonialism and the Role of Local Intermediaries
| Jake Okechukwu Effoduh | Business and Human Rights Journal | 2025
Uses a TWAIL perspective to analyze foreign corporate power and the governments, elites, contractors, and influencers that enable digital extraction.
Undersea Cables in Africa: The New Frontiers of Digital Colonialism
| Emmanuel Mwema and Nanjira Sambuli | First Monday | 2024
Maps how privately controlled cables reproduce historical routes and power relations while being promoted as solutions to the digital divide.
Fostering Cultural Inclusivity in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
| Pregala Govenden et al. | Communicatio | 2024
Introduces research on how digital technologies can reproduce colonial legacies or support cultural revitalization and social empowerment in Africa.
Decolonizing Global AI Governance: Assessment of the State of Decolonization in Sub-Saharan Africa
| Girma Ayana et al. | Royal Society Open Science | 2024
Evaluates African participation, institutions, policies, and research capacity and calls for equity and decolonial thinking in global AI governance.
Decolonising the Internet in Africa: A Policy Perspective
| Ufuoma Akpojivi | Communicatio | 2024
Critiques Western-centered governance frameworks and proposes policies grounded in African political, cultural, linguistic, and economic realities.
Resistance and Connection: An African Feminist Perspective for Decolonizing the Internet
| Rosebell Kagumire | African Feminism | 12 October 2022
Explores how African feminists use digital spaces for organizing while confronting platform violence, surveillance, exclusion, and unequal power.
Non-Dominant Languages in the Digital Landscape
| Pollicy | Pollicy | August 2022
Studies how English dominance and limited technical support marginalize African languages and constrain participation in Uganda and Nigeria.
Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop
| Billy Perrigo | TIME | 17 February 2022
Investigates low pay, trauma, retaliation, and outsourcing among Nairobi-based content moderators responsible for policing Facebook’s most disturbing material.
Reconfiguring Data Infrastructure Ecosystem in Africa: A Primer Toward Digital Sovereignty
| Olusesan Michael Awoleye | arXiv | 29 September 2021
Proposes an African roadmap for local infrastructure, cybersecurity, data control, skills, investment, and national development planning.
Appropriation, Coloniality, and Digital Technologies: Observations from Within an African Place
| Gertjan van Stam | arXiv | 23 August 2021
Reflects on how imported technologies conflict with community-centered African ways of knowing and argues for a decolonial shift in design.
Free Basics and Digital Colonialism in Africa
| Global Digital Divide Project | Global Digital Divide Project | 3 May 2020
Compares Free Basics in several African countries and argues that short-term connectivity benefits can create long-term platform dependency.
Access Granted: Facebook’s Free Basics in Africa
| Toussaint Nothias | Media, Culture & Society | 2020
Traces Free Basics’ quiet expansion across Africa and examines its walled-garden model, corporate strategy, and limited public scrutiny.
It’s Digital Colonialism: How Facebook’s Free Internet Service Has Failed Its Users
| Olivia Solon | The Guardian | 27 July 2017
Reports criticism that Free Basics restricts users to selected corporate content, undermines net neutrality, and confuses Facebook with the internet.
Asia, Latin America, and the Global South
Digital Decolonialism from Mexico to Latin America
| Gianmarco Cristofari | Institute of Network Cultures | 7 April 2026
Discusses Mexican and regional approaches to technological autonomy, labor organizing, public infrastructure, and decolonial digital politics.
Data Colonialism in the Algorithmic Age
| Debashis Chakrabarti | Eurasia Review | 20 February 2026
Argues that Global South data increasingly supplies AI systems while ownership, computation, wealth, and decision-making remain concentrated elsewhere.
Why African Languages and Knowledge Systems Matter in Online Governance
| CIPESA | CIPESA | 24 October 2025
Highlights code-mixing, oral expression, cultural context, and the limitations of platform and AI systems designed around dominant languages.
Artificial Intelligence and Digital Extractivism: Who Benefits from Data Centers in Latin America?
| Natalia Zuazo | El País | 17 October 2025
Questions whether large AI infrastructure projects will create local value or reproduce extractive development patterns involving energy, water, and data.
Data Colonialism in the Global South: Who Owns Asia’s Digital Future?
| Suhana Roy | Yale Review of International Studies | 26 July 2025
Examines data extraction, foreign platforms, surveillance, and the need for democratic digital sovereignty across Asia.
As Demand for AI Data Centres Grows, We Must Avoid Digital Extractivism
| Derechos Digitales | Brasil de Fato | 29 March 2025
Warns that data-center expansion can intensify environmental pressure and inequality unless Latin American governments impose public-interest conditions.
Where Does Digital Sovereignty Lie in Building the Brazilian Smart City?
| Isadora Schiavi et al. | Cities | 2025
Evaluates whether Brazilian smart-city projects advance self-determination or deepen reliance on externally controlled technologies and data systems.
Big Tech from the South: Thinking Beyond Data Colonialism in Latin America
| Paola Ricaurte and colleagues | Bot Populi | 28 October 2024
Examines Latin American platforms, labor precarity, regional corporate power, and why decolonial analysis must also scrutinize companies from the South.
Media, Intellectual, and Cultural Imperialism Today
| Afonso de Albuquerque | History of Media Studies | 2024
Revisits Latin American media-imperialism traditions and connects historical US influence to contemporary platform and knowledge power.
Critical Data Studies with Latin America: Theorizing Beyond Data Colonialism
| João Carlos Lara Valente et al. | Big Data & Society | 2024
Draws on Latin American dependency, liberation, and decolonial thought to expand critical analysis of datafication beyond imported frameworks.
China’s Digital Silk Road: Challenges and Opportunities for Latin America and the Caribbean
| Irina Arsentyeva and colleagues | Vestnik RUDN International Relations | 2024
Analyzes the Digital Silk Road as both an alternative to Western dominance and a possible source of new technological dependence.
China’s Digital Expansion in the Global South
| Richard Heeks et al. | The Information Society | 2024
Reviews evidence on Chinese telecommunications, platforms, finance, surveillance, and infrastructure across the Global South and identifies research gaps.
Technological Cartographies: Digital Colonialism in the Internet’s Territories
| Coding Rights | Coding Rights | 22 December 2022
Visualizes the physical infrastructure, corporate concentration, algorithmic systems, and extractive relations hidden behind the metaphor of the cloud.
Lessons from Digital India for the Right to Internet Access
| Kaustubh D. Dhole | arXiv | 12 November 2022
Argues that meaningful internet access requires affordability, safety, privacy, fairness, and legal recognition rather than connectivity alone.
China’s Digital Silk Road Aims to Connect the World
| Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian | Axios | 19 October 2021
Explains China’s global expansion in fiber, satellites, cloud computing, surveillance, and communications hardware and its geopolitical implications.
From Digital Divide to Digital Justice in the Global South
| Richard Heeks | arXiv | 22 August 2021
Introduces adverse digital incorporation to explain how inclusion can still enable wealthier actors to extract disproportionate value from marginalized users.
Data Sovereignty in India
| A. Bhatt | ILI Law Review | 2021
Reviews India’s pursuit of data localization, cloud sovereignty, national regulation, and reduced dependence on foreign-controlled digital systems.
Facebook and the New Colonialism
| Adrienne LaFrance | The Atlantic | 11 February 2016
Covers the colonial rhetoric surrounding India’s rejection of Free Basics and the struggle over who defines access to the internet.
Facebook Free Basics Has Been Banned in India
| Matt Burgess | WIRED | 8 February 2016
Explains India’s net-neutrality ruling against discriminatory data pricing and the campaign opposing Facebook’s restricted version of internet access.
Peru Discovers Machu Penguin
| Julia Scheeres | WIRED | 23 April 2002
Describes Latin American government interest in free and open-source software as a strategy for reducing licensing dependence and building local capacity.
Indigenous Data and Digital Sovereignty
War, Climate Change and AI: What’s at Stake at This Year’s UN Indigenous Forum
| Jamey Keaten and colleagues | Associated Press | 20 April 2026
Reports Indigenous concerns about AI extraction, traditional knowledge, health data, land, consent, and the right to control community information.
A Framework for Kara-Kichwa Data Sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean
| WariNkwi K. Flores et al. | arXiv | 10 January 2026
Presents an Indigenous legal and relational framework for governing data through self-determination, collective authority, accountability, memory, and biocultural ethics.
Towards a Decolonial AI Sovereignty Model for Indigenous Education
| M. F. Mbah et al. | Cogent Education | 2026
Proposes Indigenous-led governance of generative AI in education, emphasizing community authority, local knowledge, consent, and culturally grounded design.
AI and Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Knowing, Engaging and Sharing
| Julie Russ-Smith et al. | Somatechnics | 18 December 2025
Introduces scholarship on AI, Indigenous authority, data decision-making, knowledge stewardship, relational accountability, and technological futures.
Digital Sovereignty or Digital Colonialism? How Indigenous Communities Are Fighting for Control Over Their Data
| Peace and Humanity Monitor | Peace and Humanity Monitor | 11 September 2025
Links current data extraction to colonial research practices and profiles Indigenous efforts to reclaim ownership, access, consent, and benefit.
Ensuring Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in the Age of AI
| United Nations DESA | United Nations | 7 August 2025
Reviews both opportunities and risks of AI for Indigenous languages, knowledge, participation, privacy, and self-determination.
AI Threatens Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Digital Self-Determination
| Pei-Ting Tu | Policy Options | 22 May 2025
Compares Canada and Taiwan and argues that Indigenous communities must control the cultural and linguistic data used by commercial AI.
Indigenous Scientists Are Fighting to Protect Their Data—and Their Culture
| Justine Calma | The Verge | 12 May 2025
Profiles Indigenous researchers building servers, agreements, governance practices, and networks to protect scientific, cultural, and environmental data.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty: A Catalyst for Ethical AI in Business
| Vasundhara Rana | Business & Society | 2025
Presents Indigenous data sovereignty as a practical framework for resisting exploitation and guiding ethical corporate AI development.
Indigenous AI Futures: Uncle Chatty Gee, Aunty Lexi, and Algorithmic Colonialism
| Tristan Worrell et al. | Macquarie University | 2025
Uses Indigenous critique and humor to examine how generative AI extracts, distorts, and commodifies Indigenous knowledge, bodies, and identities.
Decolonizing Digital Technologies for Indigenous Knowledge Systems
| C. Kuranga et al. | IEEE | 2025
Proposes a community-led framework for integrating digital technology with Indigenous knowledge while protecting authority, values, and cultural continuity.
Competing Interests: Digital Health and Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| TUM Institute for Ethics and History of Health | Technical University of Munich | 16 July 2024
Examines how digital health can improve services while creating risks involving consent, ownership, commercialization, surveillance, and community authority.
Peter-Lucas Jones
Profiles Te Hiku Media’s Māori-controlled speech technology and its insistence that language data remain under Indigenous ownership and governance.
New Report and Guidelines for Indigenous Data Sovereignty in Artificial Intelligence Developments
| UNESCO | UNESCO | 11 December 2023
Summarizes guidance for respecting Indigenous rights, consent, governance, cultural knowledge, and equitable benefits in AI projects.
In Consideration of Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Data Mining as a Colonial Practice
| Jennafer Shae Roberts and Laura N. Montoya | arXiv | 19 September 2023
Applies the CARE Principles to data mining and argues that Indigenous authority must shape data-dependent technology and environmental governance.
Tribal Digital Sovereignty Defined
| American Indian Policy Institute | Arizona State University | 14 July 2023
Defines tribal digital sovereignty broadly to include data, networks, spectrum, cybersecurity, platforms, governance, and technological self-determination.
Decolonisation, Global Data Law, and Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| Jennafer Shae Roberts and Laura N. Montoya | arXiv | 28 July 2022
Explores legal reforms that could protect Indigenous cultures, environmental knowledge, privacy, access, and authority within global data systems.
Decolonizing the Digital Landscape: The Role of Technology in Indigenous Language Revitalization
| Patrick J. Meighan | AlterNative | 11 August 2021
Reviews community uses of digital tools for language revitalization and emphasizes Indigenous innovation, ownership, and control.
The Passamaquoddy Reclaim Their Culture Through Digital Repatriation
| Anna Benjamin | The New Yorker | 8 January 2019
Describes a project returning digital access and curatorial authority over historic recordings to the Passamaquoddy community.
Broadband Cowboy
| Simson Garfinkel | WIRED | 1 January 2002
Profiles an effort to use tribal sovereignty and wireless innovation to challenge restrictive spectrum policy and expand reservation broadband.
Languages, Knowledge, and Wikipedia
Towards Digital Preservation of Efik: TTS for a Low-Resource African Language
| Offiong Bassey Edet et al. | arXiv | 5 July 2026
Presents a community-evaluated speech-synthesis benchmark for Efik and documents the technical challenges of preserving tonal African languages digitally.
The African Language Tax
| Olaoye Anthony Somide | arXiv | 23 June 2026
Shows how tokenization makes many African languages more expensive, slower, and less context-efficient than English in leading language models.
Why AI Systems That Rely on the Internet Poorly Reflect the Diversity of Human Knowledge
| Deepak Varuvel Dennison | Le Monde | 16 June 2026
Explains how web crawling, linguistic inequality, paywalls, oral knowledge, and geographic bias limit the cultural diversity represented in AI training data.
AfriScience-MT: Towards Decolonizing Science in Africa through Text Translation
| Idris Abdulmumin et al. | arXiv | 28 May 2026
Introduces a multilingual corpus for translating scientific knowledge into six African languages while developing terminology with expert translators.
Multilinguality at the Edge: Developing Language Models for the Global South
| Lester James V. Miranda et al. | arXiv | 23 April 2026
Surveys multilingual language models designed for low-connectivity and hardware-constrained contexts and proposes priorities for inclusive deployment.
The Digital Lives of Greater South Languages
| Ana Deumert | Liverpool University Press Blog | 19 March 2026
Introduces research on language communities adapting, resisting, and redesigning digital technologies across the Global South.
Language Justice and Machine Translation on Social Media
| Amanda Paullada | Modern Languages Open | 2026
Advocates language-justice principles in the design and evaluation of machine translation used on social platforms.
Data Colonialism and Indigenous Languages in AI
| Jason C. Y. Kwok | AI & Society | 2026
Examines how proprietary AI can absorb Indigenous linguistic resources without consent and compares FAIR data practices with Indigenous CARE principles.
WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity Between English Wikipedia and Other Language Editions
| Zining Wang et al. | arXiv | 30 May 2025
Presents an interface that reveals complementary facts from non-English Wikipedias and challenges assumptions that English Wikipedia is complete.
Social Biases in Knowledge Representations of Wikidata Separate Global North from Global South
| Paramita Das et al. | arXiv | 5 May 2025
Audits Wikidata and finds that social biases in knowledge graphs mirror geographic and socioeconomic divisions.
Redefining Technology for Indigenous Languages
| Silvia Fernandez-Sabido and Laura Peniche-Sabido | arXiv | 2 April 2025
Finds that community-developed technologies can strengthen Indigenous languages while externally imposed tools may reproduce devaluation and dependence.
Continuations from European Colonialism to AI: Language Materialization and Computational Culture
| Bettina Migge et al. | AI & Society | 2025
Links colonial language classification and standardization to contemporary computational systems that treat languages as fixed technical objects.
Layers of Technology in Pluriversal Design
| Gertraud Koch et al. | arXiv | 2 May 2024
Uses the LiveLanguage initiative to show how minority-language technologies can be co-designed across data, services, institutions, and communities.
Decolonizing Language Learning in Digital Environments
| Angelica Galante et al. | Applied Linguistics | 2024
Evaluates a plurilingual digital pedagogy designed to resist monolingual norms and support learner empowerment and multilingualism.
Decolonisation through Digitalisation? African Languages at South African Universities
| Irina Turner | Curriculum Perspectives | 2023
Examines efforts to integrate African languages into university digital systems as part of wider institutional decolonization.
Wikipedia’s Enlightenment Problem
| Matthew A. Vetter et al. | Selected Papers of Internet Research | 2022
Critiques Wikipedia policies that privilege published Western sources and make oral and Indigenous knowledge difficult to represent.
Digitally Disadvantaged Languages
| Isabelle A. Zaugg | Internet Policy Review | 2022
Defines the layered technical, economic, institutional, and political barriers that prevent many languages from thriving online.
Decolonizing Minority Language Technology
| Daniel Prado and colleagues | Internet Languages | 2020
Calls for evidence about how minority languages are used online and for technologies shaped by speakers rather than outside institutions.
Towards a Multilingual Internet
| Whose Knowledge? | Whose Knowledge? | 11 November 2019
Summarizes a convening focused on language justice, online representation, technical standards, and community authority over digital knowledge.
Creating Multilingual Digital Infrastructures
| Curationist | Curationist | n.d.
Examines how multilingual digital infrastructure can resist English-dominant systems and make cultural knowledge more accessible on communities’ own terms.
Platforms, Connectivity, and Net Neutrality
Online Racism Is Harming First Nations Australians
| Sarah Collard | The Guardian | June 13, 2026
Reports on the mental-health effects of online racism against First Nations Australians and the demand for stronger platform accountability and culturally grounded protections.
The Guardian View on the Splinternet
| Editorial Board | The Guardian | 31 May 2026
Warns that state-controlled national networks, censorship exports, and shutdowns are fragmenting the internet and shrinking space for dissent.
Strengthening Africa’s Voice in Global Internet Governance
| Smart Africa | Smart Africa | 2026
Describes efforts to coordinate African positions on infrastructure, standards, security, trade, competition, and global governance.
How Wikipedia Survives While the Rest of the Internet Breaks
| Adi Robertson | The Verge | 4 September 2025
Explores Wikipedia’s volunteer governance, neutrality processes, knowledge gaps, and resistance to political and commercial capture.
Elon Musk Also Has a Problem With Wikipedia
| Kyle Chayka | The New Yorker | January 24, 2025
Considers conflicts between billionaire-controlled platforms and Wikipedia’s nonprofit, collectively governed model of online knowledge production.
Platform Imperialism Theory from Asian Perspectives
| Dal Yong Jin | Social Media + Society | 2025
Updates platform-imperialism theory by examining global platforms, Asian cultural markets, intellectual property, and regional production.
Digital Platforms and the Global South
| Jing Guo | Critical Arts | 2025
Reviews scholarship on how global platforms shape culture, labor, politics, communication, and markets in the Global South.
Tech Policy Trends 2024: The Global South Is the New Epicentre of Internet Governance Innovation
| Access Partnership | Access Partnership | 14 February 2024
Highlights how connectivity needs, regional institutions, and emerging markets are reshaping global internet-governance debates.
Facebook and Twitter Are Failing Honduras
| Ciara Nugent | TIME | November 12, 2021
Shows how under-resourced platform moderation and political disinformation can deepen democratic vulnerability in countries treated as peripheral markets.
The Future of the Internet Is Under Greater Threat Than Ever Before
| Billy Perrigo | TIME | 22 June 2021
Reports how governments invoke sovereignty to justify censorship, surveillance, shutdowns, and pressure on platforms.
India’s New Internet Rules Could Reshape Online Speech
| Billy Perrigo | TIME | March 10, 2021
Explains how India’s platform regulations increased state leverage over global technology companies while raising serious concerns about speech, privacy, and democratic accountability.
The Digital Colonialism Behind .tv and .ly
| Daniel Immerwahr | WIRED | 7 February 2020
Shows how early domain-name decisions transferred valuable digital resources away from small states and territories.
Inside Facebook’s New Power Grab
| Louise Matsakis | WIRED | 2020
Investigates Facebook’s connectivity infrastructure, Free Basics successors, fiber investments, and growing influence over access in emerging markets.
To Reduce Inequality, Wikipedia Should Consider Paying Editors
| Mark Graham | WIRED | 11 September 2018
Argues that unpaid participation advantages wealthier regions and limits Wikipedia’s ability to represent global knowledge equitably.
Global Village, Rural Villagers
| Bruce Sterling | WIRED | May 8, 2017
Highlights the gap between universalist visions of a connected world and the lived realities of rural communities navigating unequal infrastructure and technological power.
India’s Internet Regulator Puts Facebook’s Free Basics Program on Hold
| Charlie Campbell | TIME | 30 December 2015
Covers regulatory concerns that zero-rating favored Facebook-selected services and undermined an open internet.
Introduction: The Multilingual Internet
| Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring | Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication | 2003
Introduces comparative research on how diverse languages, scripts, and cultural practices adapt to online communication.
The Effect of Native Language on Internet Usage
| Neil Gandal and Carl Shapiro | arXiv | 6 September 2001
Tests whether English-language dominance creates lasting network effects that shape who uses the internet and which languages gain investment.
Pluralistic, Not Imperialistic
| Nicholas Negroponte | WIRED | March 1996
Offers an early counterargument that decentralized networks could support cultural pluralism despite fears of English and American dominance.
Internet Governance Processes in Africa
| African School on Internet Governance | AfriSIG | n.d.
Introduces African internet-governance institutions and capacity-building efforts aimed at ensuring the continent’s communities shape the rules of the digital environment.
Artificial Intelligence, Data Labor, and Algorithmic Colonialism
AI Is Ushering in a New Era of Colonialism
| Ryan Heath | Axios | June 4, 2026
Connects AI’s appetite for data, minerals, energy, and labor to older colonial patterns of extraction and unequal control.
Auditing African Content Moderators’ Working Conditions
| Mariame Tighanimine et al. | arXiv | May 12, 2026
Explores how data-protection law can be used to investigate and challenge the working conditions of African content moderators in global AI supply chains.
Algorithmic Dependence and Digital Colonialism
| Samar A. Ahmed | Frontiers in Education | January 21, 2026
Proposes a framework for understanding how AI systems can create data, infrastructural, epistemic, and governance dependence in education across the Global South.
Could AI Drive Indigenous Knowledge Out of Fashion?
| Bella Webb | Vogue Business | 2026
Explores how generative AI can appropriate Indigenous designs and knowledge while bypassing consent, attribution, cultural protocol, and economic benefit.
Algorithmic Colonialism and the Consequences of AI
| Bronwyn Carlson et al. | Journal of Sociology | 2026
Analyzes how algorithmic systems reproduce colonial classifications, surveillance, and social hierarchies, particularly for Indigenous peoples.
AI Ethics Through a Decolonial Lens
| Selina Nemorin et al. | AI & Society | 2026
Asks what AI ethics becomes when colonial histories, structural inequality, and plural knowledge systems are treated as central rather than peripheral concerns.
Mapping Data Labour Supply Chains in Africa
| Jessica Pidoux et al. | arXiv | December 3, 2025
Maps content-moderation and data-labeling operations across Africa while centering workers’ demands for recognition, security, and collective power.
Data Flows and Colonial Regimes in Africa
| Mohamed Abdalla et al. | arXiv | November 24, 2025
Examines how African data moves through unequal technical and commercial systems that reproduce colonial relationships of extraction and control.
Reimagining the Future of Data and AI Labor in the Global South
| Michelle Du and Chinasa T. Okolo | Brookings Institution | October 7, 2025
Calls for labor standards, worker voice, transparency, and local value creation in the often-hidden Global South workforce supporting artificial intelligence.
The Global South Is Powering AI—but Not Sharing Equally in Its Benefits
| Krystal Maughan | The Guardian | August 3, 2025
Describes how workers, resources, and data from the Global South sustain AI systems while wealth and decision-making remain concentrated elsewhere.
From AI Colonialism to Co-Creation
| LSE Media | London School of Economics | July 14, 2025
Argues that closing the global AI divide requires shared design authority, local infrastructure, and partnerships that move beyond extraction and technology transfer.
Business on WhatsApp Is Tough Now
| Ankolika De | arXiv | February 15, 2025
Studies how platform changes shape the livelihoods of small businesses and workers who depend on WhatsApp in a Global South context.
Creative Data Justice: A Decolonial and Indigenous Approach
| Payal Arora et al. | Information, Communication & Society | January 8, 2025
Develops a creative data-justice approach rooted in Indigenous and decolonial practices rather than universal technical fixes imposed from dominant institutions.
Decoloniality as an Essential Trustworthy AI Requirement
| Kutoma Wakunuma | Springer | 2025
Argues that trustworthy AI cannot be achieved without addressing colonial power, epistemic exclusion, and the unequal distribution of technological risks.
Kauna Malgwi and the Organizing of African Content Moderators
| TIME | TIME100 AI | September 5, 2024
Profiles a leading organizer working to secure dignity, recognition, and labor rights for African content moderators who support major technology platforms.
The Human Exploitation That Feeds Artificial Intelligence
| Dan Milmo | The Guardian | July 6, 2024
Discusses the low-paid and psychologically damaging labor hidden behind supposedly automated AI products and the need for enforceable worker protections.
Code Dependent: Understanding the Human Impacts of AI
| John Naughton | The Guardian | March 23, 2024
Reviews evidence that AI’s harms and benefits are distributed through existing inequalities rather than arising from neutral, disembodied technology.
Critical Roles of Global South Stakeholders in AI Governance
| Marie-Therese Png | ACM FAccT | June 2022
Identifies the expertise and political agency of Global South actors as indispensable to building legitimate and globally accountable AI governance.
Artificial Intelligence in the Global South: Potential and Risks
| Peter J. Wall et al. | arXiv | August 23, 2021
Reviews AI-for-development initiatives while warning that imported systems can intensify inequality, dependency, bias, and surveillance.
Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight
| Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png, and William Isaac | Philosophy & Technology | July 12, 2020
Establishes a foundational agenda for using decolonial theory to expose power in AI and to guide more just technological research and development.
Infrastructure, Clouds, Cables, and Domains
The Strait of Hormuz Is Also a Digital Chokepoint
| Reuters | Reuters | April 28, 2026
Reports on the concentration of submarine cables near the Strait of Hormuz and the global risks created by geographically narrow infrastructure routes.
Weaponized Connectivity and the Security of Global Undersea Cables
| Atlas Institute | Atlas Institute | April 18, 2026
Explains how undersea cable concentration, geopolitical rivalry, and private ownership turn global connectivity into a source of strategic dependency.
Wired for Power: Subsea Cables in the South China Sea
| Carla Teng-Westergaard | Asia New Zealand Foundation | February 25, 2026
Analyzes how cable routes, vendors, and security policies in the South China Sea reflect competition over regional digital power.
AI Infrastructure Sovereignty
| Sergio Cruzes | arXiv | February 11, 2026
Frames sovereign AI as a question of control over compute, cloud capacity, data, energy, technical skills, and supply chains—not only models.
Situating Digital Sovereignty in Material Geographies
| Franziska Dammann | Edward Elgar Online | 2026
Grounds debates about digital sovereignty in the physical geographies of cables, data centers, energy, minerals, and territorial control.
AI and Sovereignty: The Geopolitical Power of Submarine Cables
| HEC Paris | HEC Paris | 2026
Connects AI sovereignty to the ownership, routing, and protection of submarine cables that carry most international data traffic.
Brazil and the Geopolitics of Submarine Cables
| Springer Nature | Springer Reference | December 25, 2025
Examines Brazil’s efforts to diversify international data routes and reduce dependence within a strategic infrastructure dominated by foreign powers.
AI, .io and .tv—and Their Surprising Colonial Stories
| Afnic | Afnic | September 8, 2025
Traces the political histories behind lucrative country-code domains and shows how colonial legacies persist in the internet’s naming system.
Google and Chile Launch the Humboldt Cable Project
| Associated Press | AP News | June 4, 2025
Covers a trans-Pacific cable intended to connect South America with Asia-Pacific markets while illustrating the growing infrastructural role of major technology firms.
The Hidden Cost of the Cloud: South Africa’s Data Centres
| National Science and Technology Forum | NSTF South Africa | May 2025
Examines the water, electricity, land, and policy implications of expanding data-center infrastructure in South Africa.
Cable Ships, Guardian Angels of the Global Internet
| Le Monde | Le Monde | April 27, 2025
Documents the specialized labor and geopolitical importance involved in maintaining the undersea cables on which global communications depend.
The Battle Over Africa’s Great Untapped Resource: IP Addresses
| Wall Street Journal | The Wall Street Journal | 2025
Investigates the struggle over millions of African IPv4 addresses and the consequences when scarce regional internet resources are commercialized outside the continent.
Africa’s Internet Infrastructure Must Not Be Monopolized by Big Tech
| Le Monde | Le Monde | June 6, 2024
Questions whether African states will retain meaningful control as large foreign technology companies expand their ownership of connectivity infrastructure.
Submarine Cables and the Risks to Digital Sovereignty
| Francesco Belli | ResearchGate | February 16, 2024
Reviews how concentrated cable ownership, foreign jurisdiction, and surveillance exposure can undermine national and regional digital sovereignty.
Data Infrastructure Studies on an Unequal Planet
| Patrick Brodie | Big Data & Society | June 20, 2023
Shows how data centers reproduce uneven environmental and economic relations through their energy demands, extractive footprints, and global supply chains.
Nautilus: A Framework for Mapping Submarine Cables and IP Links
| S. Ramanathan and V. Abdu Jyothi | arXiv | February 27, 2023
Develops methods for connecting logical internet routes to physical submarine cables, making hidden infrastructural dependencies more visible.
This Has Nothing to Do With Clouds
| Quincy Childs | Commonplace | June 29, 2022
Uses a Swedish data-center region to expose the material extraction and colonial histories concealed by the supposedly immaterial metaphor of cloud computing.
The Long-Term Future of the .tv Domain Is Uncertain
| SIDN | SIDN | October 14, 2021
Explains the contested future of Tuvalu’s profitable country-code domain and the dependence created when national revenue rests on externally operated internet assets.
I Want My .tv
| David Diamond | WIRED | October 1, 1998
Provides an early account of the commercial scramble for Tuvalu’s country-code domain and the uneasy conversion of national identity into a global digital commodity.
The History of the .nu Domain
| The .NU Domain | NNNN.nu | n.d.
Documents the contested history of Niue’s country-code domain, including disputes over consent, revenue, and who should benefit from a national digital resource.
Feminist, Community, and Decentralized Alternatives
Digital Patriotism and European Alternatives to Big Tech
| Advait Sarkar | arXiv | April 17, 2026
Analyzes public interest in switching from dominant US platforms to European alternatives and the political meanings attached to digital sovereignty.
Sovereignty in Europe: The Role of Free and Open-Source Software
| Open Source Science | OS-SCi | April 2026
Connects software freedom with the ability of public institutions and communities to inspect, modify, host, and govern their own digital systems.
Digital Sovereignty and Open Source in Europe
| TYPO3 Association | TYPO3 | February 19, 2026
Argues that open-source software strengthens public control, auditability, interoperability, and institutional independence from dominant technology vendors.
France Dumps Zoom and Teams in a Sovereignty Push
| Associated Press | AP News | February 2, 2026
Reports on a government move toward domestically controlled digital tools, illustrating both the possibilities and limits of state-led technological independence.
Understanding Digital Sovereignty
| Karakun | Karakun | November 17, 2025
Explains practical dimensions of digital sovereignty, including open standards, control of infrastructure, interoperability, and freedom from vendor lock-in.
A Decolonial Feminist Analysis of Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence
| Association for Progressive Communications | APC | November 14, 2025
Introduces feminist research connecting online gender-based violence to coloniality, platform power, race, class, sexuality, and uneven access to justice.
Community Networks in the Global South
| T20 South Africa | T20 South Africa | November 5, 2025
Presents community-owned networks as inclusive, decentralized responses to connectivity gaps and recommends supportive regulation, finance, and governance.
Tiballi: Decolonizing the Internet Through Action Research in Ghana
| Capacity4dev | European Commission | May 14, 2025
Presents a Ghana-based action-research project exploring locally meaningful internet access, community knowledge, and alternatives to externally imposed digital development.
Derechos Digitales: Two Decades of Latin American Digital Rights
| Association for Progressive Communications | APC | April 22, 2025
Profiles a Latin American organization building regionally grounded expertise on privacy, expression, surveillance, platforms, and emerging technology.
Deep Diving Into Decolonizing Structured Data
| Whose Knowledge? | Whose Knowledge? | December 2023
Investigates how categories, metadata, and linked-data systems reproduce colonial assumptions and offers community-led approaches to restructuring them.
Whose Knowledge? A Movement for Inclusive Representation on Wikipedia
| Wikimedia Foundation | Wikimedia Foundation | March 1, 2023
Describes community-led work to shift Wikipedia’s knowledge gaps by centering women, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ+ communities, and the Global South.
Will Community Networks Change Our Approach to Connectivity?
| Association for Progressive Communications | APC | December 1, 2022
Explores locally built and governed networks that treat connectivity as a community resource rather than a service delivered solely by corporations.
A Feminist Revolt to Decolonise Data and Algorithms
| Genoveva Vargas-Solar | arXiv | September 17, 2022
Calls for feminist resistance to the extraction, categorization, and automated governance of people through data-intensive systems.
Seeing Is Believing: Why Online Visibility Matters
| Mariana Fossatti and Adele Vrana | Whose Knowledge? | March 9, 2020
Shows how online invisibility is produced by power and why marginalized communities must control how they are represented in digital knowledge.
Decolonizing Digital: Bringing Indigeneity Into Online Spaces
| Indigenous Action Media | Intercontinental Cry | January 20, 2017
Discusses Indigenous presence online as a practice of self-representation, cultural continuity, political resistance, and refusal of colonial digital norms.
Whose Knowledge Is Online?
| Whose Knowledge? | Whose Knowledge? | n.d.
Advances practices of epistemic justice that center marginalized communities in decisions about what knowledge is digitized, structured, and made visible.
Feminist Principles of the Internet
| Association for Progressive Communications | Feminist Principles of the Internet | n.d.
Sets out a movement-built vision of an internet grounded in access, agency, consent, expression, resistance, care, and freedom from patriarchal violence.
Decolonizing the Digital: Feminism and Intersectech
| Gunda-Werner Institute | Heinrich Böll Foundation | n.d.
Brings feminist and intersectional analysis to digital power, asking who designs technology, whose bodies are targeted, and whose knowledge is excluded.
Decolonizing Technology and Society: A Global South Perspective
| TU Wien | Digital Humanism Initiative | n.d.
Reframes digital humanism through Global South histories and priorities, challenging universal claims made from European and North American experience.
Decolonizing Knowledge Production Through Linked Open Data
| University of Edinburgh | Open.Ed | n.d.
Explores how linked open data can support more plural knowledge systems when communities participate in describing, connecting, and governing cultural information.
