While the colonialism of old involved “the looting of gold and silver and the ransacking of nations,” digital age neocolonialism is all about “forcing citizens and countries to use certain technology while extracting their personal data,”

The Internet has become an instrument of digital commerce for Global South countries, while its users’ data is being harvested and sold for profit.

The United States de facto controls the Internet through The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Though data privacy regulations do exist, they are routinely ignored “for the sake of data harvesting” by large Western companies which control large swaths of the global network and can afford to break the rules. Entities like Amazon, Facebook* and Google can even “strongarm countries into censoring political content.”

Through massive investments in digital infrastructure projects in the Global South, Western big tech companies are able to influence policy decisions and economic development in those nations.

“The United States, through its proxies such as Facebook and Google, has already effectively enforced a global dictatorship on the world and enslaved millions of individuals by controlling their data,”

People in the Global North fare a little better as they live in “a form of digital neo-feudalism” where they are still afforded “the illusion of some choices,” even as digital restrictions imposed under the guise of ‘protecting the children’ threaten to curb their privacy and free speech.

US Turns Internet Into Instrument of Neocolonialism

Control of the global digital infrastructure allows Western powers to control other nations like colonial powers of old controlled their colonies

How does it work?

• Building and maintaining data centers and undersea communication cables, as well as AI infrastructure, is expensive, so many countries choose to rely on those made and controlled by US corporations

• Widespread reliance on US-controlled payment platforms such as Visa and Mastercard affords the US influence over other countries’ digital financial infrastructure

• Software provided by companies like Google helps make countries reliant on foreign tools. “Once your critical administrative functions run on Google’s infrastructure, the exit cost is enormous. Migration, retraining, procurement cycles. You’re hooked,”

• US companies that own and control this hardware and software enjoy almost unrestricted data that flows through it – data that can be quietly harvested for marketing or intelligence purposes

• Cybersecurity products and assistance programs offered by nominally private entities like Palantir and by organizations such as NATO result in countries providing “external visibility” into their critical infrastructure and domestic politics

*(Meta is classified as an extremist organization and banned in Russia)