'Concentrated data sector worsens global inequality'

By Abdulkadir Gunyol

ISTANBUL (AA) - The data industry is highly concentrated into the hands of a few big technology giants, with harmful consequences for global equality, according to Michael Kwet, a visiting fellow in Yale Law School.

"Much like oil, data becomes enormously valuable if you extract a lot of it and process it into something useful," he told Anadolu Agency.

Kwet underlined that massive Silicon Valley corporations collected online searches, social media comments and transactions on e-commerce platforms by ordinary people.

"There is no reason for anyone to have this amount of richly detailed information about society. It happened so quickly that it caught the world off guard," he said.

Kwet stressed: "Digital colonialism is the use of digital technology for social, political, and economic control over another territory."

This is achieved principally through the domination of the "digital ecosystem", comprised of software, hardware, and internet connectivity, he asserted.

Classic colonialism by imperial powers designed infrastructure such as railroads and seaports to carry raw materials extracted by indigenous labor to Europe and sell back them as a manufactured products to colonial territories, undermining local capacities for industry development, he underlined.

Kwet added that under digital colonialism, U.S.-based companies had colonized most of the valuable "digital land", such as operating systems, cloud infrastructure, social networks, office suites, app stores, computer processors, streaming entertainment, and e-commerce services.

"This is having a terrible impact on the Global South. Transportation, online advertising, tourism, entertainment, and other industries are rapidly losing market share to foreign tech corporations centered in Silicon Valley," he noted.

He added that leaked documents revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) enlisted tech giants including Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and Google, who gave "government spies" access to their data.

China was following the U.S. as a growing threat in this arena with technology companies such as Huawei, which is the world leader in 5G cellular networking, Kwet said.

He stressed that China was exploiting homegrown technology to exercise dystopian forms of social control.

"The most severe manifestation can be seen in the Xinjiang region, where around a million Uyghur Muslims have been forced into internment camps and live under a repressive regime of digital surveillance. WeChat is used to spy on Chinese citizens, including Muslims from Xinjiang, who are targeted even when they are living abroad," he said.

Kwet noted that the value of the "frightful five" big technology corporations -- Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft -- reached over $4 trillion, larger than than that of many nations.

*Writing by Gokhan Ergocun