IP laws and digital technologies contribute to forms of digital colonialism where US digital giants dominate critical aspects of technology infrastructure and information flow in the Global South. This control allows colonial powers to maintain hegemony over digital spaces and resources crucial for local development and autonomy.

Under colonialism, Europeans dispossessed the natives of their land, settled their territories, put them to work as slaves and servants, instituted horrific acts of violence, and perpetuated dependency and plunder through strategic underdevelopment. Corporations played a pivotal role through the ‘pathological pursuit of profit and power’.7 In 1602, the Dutch East India Company became the first modern global corporation. Fifty years later, it initiated European conquest in Southern Africa with the establishment of the Cape Colony. Over the next two centuries, whites seized large swathes of land as colonists expanded into the interior. After the discovery of diamonds and gold, the British and the Afrikaners consolidated the remaining majority of land and further subjugated the African population under racist regimes of labour exploitation. In no time flat, a handful of corporations came to dominate large parts of the economy.8 Today, a new form of corporate colonisation is taking place. Instead of the conquest of land, Big Tech corporations are colonising digital technology. The following functions are all dominated by a handful of US multinationals: search engines (Google); web browsers (Google Chrome); smartphone and tablet operating systems (Google Android, Apple iOS); desktop and laptop operating systems (Microsoft Windows); office software (Microsoft Office, Google G Suite); cloud infrastructure and services (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM); social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter); transportation (Uber, Lyft); business networking (Microsoft LinkedIn); streaming video (Google YouTube, Netflix, Hulu); and online advertising (Google, Facebook) – among others. GAFAM now comprise the five wealthiest corporations in the world, with a combined market cap exceeding $3 trillion.9 If South Africans integrate Big Tech products into their society, the United States will obtain enormous power over their economy and create technological dependencies that will lead to perpetual resource extraction. Early research and case examples suggest the economic impact of Big Tech intermediaries is detrimental to local African industries. Murphy, Carmody and Surborg, who studied the role of ICTs among small, medium, and micro-sized enterprises (SMMEs) in South Africa’s and Tanzania’s wood and tourism industries, found that ICTs introduced the dominance of information intermediaries. Increased use of ICTs also led to greater worker surveillance in some instances. They concluded that ICT integration is, on balance, benefiting foreign-owned businesses and corporations.10 Similar conclusions can be derived from press accounts of the transportation industry. Since Uber began operating in Johannesburg in 2013, there have been labour strikes and violent clashes in the ‘South African taxi wars’. Several e-hailing taxi murders have been carried out by metered taxi drivers, who have warned that Uber will ‘burn’ if it remains in South Africa. At the same time, many Uber drivers endure onerous working conditions for low pay.11 Uber has had devastating effects in Africa and beyond.12 The company takes around 25 per cent commission for each trip, in addition to hidden costs,13 leading to an outflow of revenue from the local economy to foreign coffers. Moreover, it is able to undercut local markets by offering artificially low prices: Uber can operate at a loss – to the tune of billions – thanks to funding from Wall Street and other wealthy investors.14 With the backing of corporate finance, it leverages predatory subsidies, network effects, Big Data analytics, and the deregulatory effects of its position as an ‘intermediary’ to stamp out competition and colonise the market. Within just two years, Uber sported a net worth of R1.65 billion ($125 million) inside South Africa.15 Similar problems have emerged in the media. In April 2017, the online news outlet GroundUp dropped Google Ads from its website. GroundUp’s Nathan Geffen explains the Google advertising model is ‘broken’ for publishers who ‘have to put up with poor quality, misleading adverts in exchange for small change’. ‘The problem’, Geffen says, ‘is that nearly all the power in the online advertising relationship lies with Google.’ The ad giant also serves up censorship threats: in one example, Google issued a warning to GroundUp for publishing a picture containing a painted bare breast as part of a protest action.16 In November 2017, Financial Mail’s Anton Harber wrote a feature story deeming Google and Facebook ‘the biggest threat to South African news media’.17 Google takes 70 per cent of local online advertising, while social media – led by Facebook – takes another 12 per cent. The major South African media groups are left with just 8 per cent of the pie. The Google and Facebook ‘nemesis’ is an expanding duopoly: the two take 77 per cent of online advertising spend in the US and captured virtually all the ad growth in 2016.18 If this continues, Harber exclaims, ‘the big two could have a devastating effect on the media’s role in defining democracy’.19 These early examples provide clear instances of digital colonialism whereby foreign corporations undermine local development, dominate the market, and extract revenue from the Global South, with power obtained primarily through the structural domination of digital architecture, which leads to more general forms of imperial control. Imperial control through architectural design Colonial conquest typically entails dispossession of valuable resources from the native peoples and ownership and control of infrastructure by colonial powers. In many parts of the Global South, critical infrastructure such as railways was designed by foreign imperialists not to benefit the indigenous population, but to service the mother country. In the arrangement that emerged through European colonialism, raw materials were extracted by exploited local labour and shipped back to the empire. In some cases, colonial forces would import the cheap, machine-made industrial products to the villages, undermining local artisans and the capacity to build competitor industries. In Africa and elsewhere, railroads were built from the country interior straight to the ports and military stations, with little ‘spread effect’ to connect up the indigenous people. The architectural design of the production system was not engineered to benefit the local inhabitants, but to ‘serve immediate European needs’.20 Under digital colonialism, foreign powers, led by the US, are planting infrastructure in the Global South engineered for their own needs, enabling economic and cultural domination while imposing privatised forms of governance. To accomplish this task, major corporations design digital technology to ensure their own dominance over critical functions in the tech ecosystem. This allows them to accumulate profits from revenues derived from rent (in the form of intellectual property or access to infrastructure) and surveillance (in the form of Big Data). It also empowers them to exercise control over the flow of information (such as the distribution of news and streaming services), social activities (like social networking and cultural exchange), and a plethora of other political, social, economic and military functions mediated by their technologies. The control of code is foundational to digital domination. In Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig famously argued that computer code shapes the rules, norms and behaviours of computer-mediated experiences in ways similar to architecture in physical space (e.g. imperial railways designed for colonisation).21 ‘Code is law’ in the sense that it has the power to usurp legal, institutional and social norms impacting the political, economic and cultural domains of society. This critical insight has been applied in fields like copyright, free speech regulation, Internet governance, blockchain, privacy, and even torts. What has been missed, however, is how US dominance of code – and other forms of digital architecture – usurps other countries’ sovereignty. Digital forms of power are linked through the three core pillars of the digital ecosystem: software, hardware and network connectivity.22 (Software is the set of instructions that define and determine what your computer can do. Hardware is the physical equipment used for computer experiences. The network is the set of protocols and standards computers use to talk to each other, and the connections they make.) Software functions as the coded logic that constrains and enables particular user experiences. For example, software determines rules and policies such as whether or not users can post a message anonymously at a website, or whether or not users can make a copy of a copyright-restricted file like an e-book. The rules that a programmer codes into the software largely determine technological freedoms and shape users’ experiences using their devices. Thus, software exerts a powerful influence on the behaviour, policies and freedoms of people using digital technology.