Bridge the digital divide without losing digital sovereignty
Digital colonialism is driven by Big Tech’s economic imperatives, as opposed to the political goals of their home governments. Even so, the current political economy of global digital trade suits the west just fine, especially as efforts are afoot by America, goaded by the Big Tech lobby no doubt, to institutionalize the lopsided status quo.
While the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) envisages an e-commerce protocol, doubts remain about whether one will be agreed on time, as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is working on a global protocol, or how effective it will be (when and if finally in place ) in repairing the state-firm and global north-south imbalances when the implementation of more pressing and basic trade protocols has been sluggish thus far.
“Globally, we have seen the integration and dependency of the Internet and digital technologies spread from the West and imposed on other states, the African continent in particular.” The Chinese variant of this digital neocolonialism of African countries is an interesting case in point.
While China guards its digital sovereignty jealously, it is even more rabid than the west in planting its flag in as many places in Africa’s cyberspace, doing so both covertly and overtly, from eavesdropping on conversations within the walls of the African Union (AU) headquarters it financed and built, to data acquisition through backdoors in the hardware and software that its firms sell to many African firms and governments. It is no coincidence therefore that China has also been the largest foreign investor in African infrastructure for more than a decade.
Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft have also been exploiting tax loopholes in African countries to boost profits
Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft have also been exploiting tax loopholes in African countries to boost profits. An OECD-backed effort towards a 15% global minimum tax on multinationals, which owing to the increasing digitalization of global commerce are able to more efficiently evade taxes abroad, comes with conditions that are inimical to the digital sovereignty of African countries.
Thankfully, many African countries have refused to endorse it. But how is the digital divide between rich and poor countries and the digital colonialism that increasingly thrives under the guise of the former supposedly trying to bridge the gap in the latter to be reconciled otherwise?
The nationalisation of data as a resource like minerals or crude oil to be bid for, with royalties and taxes paid upon successful licensing has been suggested. In a supposedly altruistic effort to bridge the digital divide in Africa and elsewhere, Big Tech and its allies in the NGO sector “act with urgency to connect as many people as possible, as fast as possible, neglecting considerations like content, long-term sustainability, or basic literacy on important issues such as privacy and security online” (Pinto, 2018).
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Civil society groups in African countries can also be part of the solution if they are technically and financially empowered, as data privacy laws enacted in 2021 by Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe owing to their efforts show.
Also, change has to come from Big Tech itself, barring which potential regulation could be overbearing, thus weighing on the many benefits that they bring to the continent. Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan author and commentator on the socio-political impact of tech in Africa, puts it rather well when she avers that “this fantasy that you can just build platforms in Silicon Valley and spread them around the world without having to engage with the realities of the societies in which you’re projecting, I think, needs to be challenged at a social level.”
For example, Facebook, whose Free Basics initiative enables free access to Facebook in 30 African countries, and is building a subsea internet cable to connect 16 African countries, has lately been subject to criticisms for supporting authoritarian African regimes, whose cooperation it needs to succeed on the continent. What is concerning is that Big Tech has not been any more politically responsible than the dictators it props up, when it could otherwise be a force for change.
Platform collusion extends the digital domination trend, which started with the privatisation of hitherto free software, that are now increasingly centralised in the servers of Big Tech abroad (“The Cloud”). Africans are thus deprived of agency in their digital experiences via data, software and platforms, a situation authoritarian African governments happily enable in exchange for tech-enabled political control.
An edited version was first published by the Italian Institute for International Political Studies in Milan, Italy. References, figures and tables are in the
original article. See link viz. https://www.ispionline.it/en/pubblicazione/digitalisation-sustainable-infrastructure-road-ahead-36357
