Digital Colonialism and What IS Research Gets Wrong

In 2016, India's Telecom Regulatory Authority blocked Facebook's Free Basics program on net neutrality grounds. The program offered users in developing countries free access to a limited set of internet services, with Facebook itself prominently included. The case attracted attention because it crystallized something that was already true but rarely stated plainly: a private American company was proposing to be the gatekeeper for what "the internet" meant for hundreds of millions of people who had never been online before. India said no. Most of the countries where Free Basics launched did not.

I have been thinking about that episode since I started paying more attention to the geographic distribution of digital infrastructure. The infrastructure of the contemporary internet, cloud computing providers, undersea fiber-optic cables, the two dominant smartphone operating systems, the platforms that mediate search, social communication, and commerce, is controlled by a remarkably small number of companies, most of them headquartered in the United States or China. For most of the world, participating in the digital economy means routing your data, your communications, and your economic activity through systems designed, owned, and governed by entities you have no vote over and no contract with.

The word "colonialism" is contested when applied to digital infrastructure, and I want to use it carefully. I am not claiming equivalence with historical colonialism, which involved physical coercion, forced resource extraction, and systematic cultural erasure at a scale that digital power relationships have not reached. What I am saying is that the structural pattern has similarities worth taking seriously: a small group of technologically dominant actors controlling the infrastructure through which peripheral actors must operate, with the terms of that operation set unilaterally by the center. Dependency. Asymmetric data flows. Governance by the powerful over the conditions of participation by the less powerful.

For IS research, this raises questions that the field has been slow to confront directly. The IS for Development literature (IS4D) has existed for decades, studying how information systems can support economic development in lower-income contexts. Zhu et al. (2006) showed empirically that innovation assimilation differs substantially between developed and developing country contexts, and warned that theories built mainly in mature markets may not travel cleanly. That is an important methodological caution. But the IS4D literature has sometimes framed the challenge as "how do we bring digital infrastructure to underserved populations" rather than "who controls that infrastructure and under what terms." The second question is harder and more political, which is probably why the field has avoided it.

Data sovereignty is the specific governance question that I think IS researchers should be engaging with more directly. When a government entity in a lower-income country uses cloud infrastructure provided by a major US or European provider, the data generated by that government's operations is stored and processed under legal frameworks it did not write. When a business in sub-Saharan Africa uses a major platform for payments or logistics, the behavioral data generated by that business flows to servers it does not control, under terms it largely cannot negotiate. The political and economic consequences of this dependency are significant, and IS governance research has the tools to study them.

The cultural representation problem is related but distinct. When the dominant platforms for search, social media, and content are designed primarily for English-speaking users in high-income countries, they embed assumptions about language, social norms, content relevance, and economic context that do not generalize. Algorithmic content ranking systems trained on data from one cultural context will systematically misrank or invisibilize content from other contexts. This is not a neutral technical outcome. It is a consequence of design choices made by a small number of companies whose business incentives point toward their largest existing markets.

What bothers me about the state of IS research here is something I would call the default assumption problem. When I read IS papers, the implicit "organizational context" is usually a large firm in the United States or Western Europe, with reliable internet infrastructure, a formal employment relationship, a legal system that enforces contracts, and a regulatory environment designed for digital commerce. This is a fine context to study. It is not the context most of the world's organizations operate in. And when IS researchers do study organizations in other contexts, the framing is too often "how are they adapting to technologies designed elsewhere" rather than "how should technologies be designed for this context, and what theoretical tools help us understand the politics of that design question."

The India Free Basics case is useful precisely because it shows what pushback looks like. India had the regulatory capacity to say no, which most countries do not. The question of what digital infrastructure governance should look like for countries that lack that capacity is one IS researchers should be asking. It is not only a technology policy question. It is an organizational, institutional, and governance question, the kind IS research is equipped to address.