A Webinar summarized by Rachmi Hertanti (member of AEPF Cluster on A just trade and Corporate Accountability)

The digital economy is globally organised and there is considerable merit for it remaining so, which enables easy exchanges and flow of data. Data is the key resource in a digital society and economy. But currently, most of data value is extracted in and by one or two digital superpowers who control most of the global digital platforms.

Many questions on the control of data and its impact on people, such as who makes decisions on the utilization of data and who secures, who benefit from the use of this data, what is the state of regulation, and who is shaping the digital governance regime nowadays? 

During the AEPF Week of Action on Solidarities for Climate Justice and Just Transition on October 2022, a webinar on “Data Colonization Hinders a Just transition” tried to answer all these questions. It was organized by Focus on the Global South, S2B Network, Transnational Institute (TNI), Global Justice Now (GJN), IT for Change India, Indonesia for Global Justice (IGJ), Sahita Institute (Hints), Public Services International Asia Pacific, Third World Network, Asia-Europe People’s Forum (AEPF).

The webinar aimed to raise awareness of social movements (at grassroots and national level) of the fundamental problems of data colonialization in realizing climate justice and just transition to the peoples in the Global South, and broadening the network to campaign against digital capitalism in the global trade agreement negotiations at the WTO JSI E-commerce and FTAs driven by big techs interest. 

Digital Colonization

The big problems arising from the digital economy is not well understood at all. This is because people who control the narrative do not want it to be understood for what it is. Parminder Jeet Singh from IT for Change revealed the true facts behind this big problem. He explained the fundamental problem of data monopoly and cross-border data flows. 

Data is raw material because it provides intelligence about the subjects of data. And therefore, the real asset is intelligence and the corporations which are at the top of the value chain today, are those corporations which own the intelligence of the sector. These corporations  supersede the intellectual property owned relations, which were till a few years back, at the top of the global value chains.

What is happening today is that for the first-time systematic intelligence has been disembodied from human beings into machines. Not just the intelligence we know in a computer which is a recorded or a deflected intelligence, but a somewhat autonomous system, artificial intelligence and machines that can run whole sectors’ activities and actors almost autonomously.

Now, when looking at Amazon and Uber, the next question is what kind of company are they? Many people only see these companies as platforms for retail and transport. The platform does not really mean much. But, with the data collected by Uber, the autonomous system at once is able to orchestrate the actors activity in the whole Transportation sector. These corporations’ main asset is the intelligence system owned by them. Therefore, these platform companies are called the intelligence corporations. 

In the digital transformation age, the new chain is the data produced in developing countries collected by platforms which are owned by majority big techs in developed countries. The product of intelligence resides inside servers and is controlled by the big tech companies in the US, EU, and even China where then it is exercised over by the physical activity in most of developing countries. UNCTAD statistic shows that 90% of data ownership is divided between the US and China big techs and this is a kind of concentration of wealth. 

That is how the digital colonization happens. If we go to the Industrial Age as an analogy, the industrial colonization consisted of a chain of economic activities where  raw material was produced in the colonies, who were forced  to remain as producers of raw material for the industries in the west, or industrialized countries from where than the finished product was then sold to all, including to the colonies.  And these sectors were monetized, precisely to be able to sell their finished products. Once we keep on getting dependent on what is called ‘Outsource intelligence’, that dependency is acute. There is nothing in comparison to this intelligence-based and database dependencies which are being created. 

So, one of the biggest things we need to do, to address the power of foreign platforms is to have data infrastructures as public infrastructure. India has a committee report of non-personal data framework. It has come up with mandatory sharing of data by platforms of important data. This obliges big data companies, to put the data on infrastructure inside the country where everyone could use it equally within the country. It is not allowed to put the data outside the country. Without the provision of putting up data within the host country, it will create another form of data colonization, but within the country if data infrastructure is developed, then the platforms that collect data are mandated to share that data and therefore local industry can be developed. And we can start digital industrial policy at the national level. 

The Impact in the Agricultural Sector

In the age of rapid expansion of digitalization in every sphere of  life, there is a need for the farmers of the world to wage a war against this monopoly of data across the world. Afsar Jafri, a researcher of GRAIN, unpacked the phenomena where data is being used to monopolize the agriculture system in the developing world where farmers and farming are already in big distress.

In food and agriculture, the industry 4.0 is termed as agriculture 4.0. And interchangeably is also called  ‘smart farming’ and digital agriculture changes. The whole food supply chain is getting increasingly digitalized, or turned into digital information, using data related technologies, such as Precision agriculture, automatic sensory, tracking devices, Internet of Things, mobile and Cloud Technologies, artificial intelligence, or blockchain. Therefore,  data is the core of the digital agriculture system. 

The OECD report 2019 says that the agriculture sector is both an important consumer and supplier of data for the big tech companies. Farm data are particularly important to facilitate global value chain integration. So, as per this report, farmers and farming are the new market. But this report also cautions that essential information like soil conditions, climate and water quality that should be publicly accessible to farmers as it is necessary for agriculture production can easily be extracted, stored, privatized, and monopolized by a handful of agribusiness and digital companies. 

The implementation of digital technologies in agriculture, like the artificial intelligence drones and e-commerce are growing at lightning speed. Agribusiness corporations are teaming up with digital technology companies and creating their own digital arms to create products and services targeting food Supply chains. Today, there is an unprecedented level of investment in digital information, platforms, connected to their cloud services from digital and ICT information and communications  technology companies that traditionally have not worked in the agriculture sector and these are the platform companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook. 

The GRAIN research shows that in 2020 investment in Agri-tech has been more than tripled to 31 billion dollars from 9 billion dollars in 2016. These big company are sitting on vertical and horizontal integration as happens along the food supply chain. The Corporations see the potential of gathering agriculture data enabling enabled by digital technologies to monopolize the supply chain and maximize their profit by using drones and artificial intelligence, and censoring devices. The Big Techs are able to harvest real-time farmers data and analyses the condition of their soil and water, the pattern of growth of their core crops and situation regarding  pests and diseases and the looming weather and climate changes. 

For example, Microsoft has developed a digital platform called Azure FarmBeats that operates through the company’s massive Global Cloud technology called Azure. The platform is being designed to provide farmers with real-time data and analysis on conditions of their soils and water. In addition they will provide date on the growth of their crops, the situation with pests and diseases, the looming weather, and climatic changes they may face. The value of this information and advice depends on the volume and quality of data that Microsoft can Harvest and analyse with algorithms. This is why Microsoft has partnered with the leading companies, that are developing farm drones and censoring devices as well as with those company developing technologies that can receive and act upon the information transmitted from FarmBeats, the high-tech tractors, pesticide spraying drones and other machines hook up to Azure cloud.  

In September, 20, Microsoft and Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA) in Africa, which is also one of the big programs by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, developing a partnership to help Microsoft expand its Azure FarmBeats platform across Africa, and deepen their joint effort to deploy Microsoft chatbot app called Kuzabot. This app provides small farmers with advice via WhatsApp and SMS, including information on what inputs to use, and which companies to buy from. 

In India, we have seen a similar exercise. Microsoft signed an MoU with the Union agriculture Ministry in April 2021 to set up AgriStack, which is a unified farmer services interface to provide Indian farmers “End To end Services” across the agriculture food value chain. With this, Microsoft could possibly get access to the database of 50 million farmers and their land records, maintained by the government under different programs with the possibility of more data being added later. Data collected could include personal details, for example, family and bank details, profile of land, health, the measurement of the land, the fertility of the soil, the production details,  sowing details crop quality and the financial details for the gum, how much loan the farmer had, what kind of the credit rating, etc. The farmers’ every  details will go to to the Microsoft data bank. 

Experts fear that the huge amount of data that this project is going to collect can lead to massive exploitation of farmers using their own data against them along with the erosion of their privacy.

Another example is BAYER field view, which is a digital platform and farming platform, that extracts 87,5 billion data points from 180 million Acres of Farmland in 23 countries and funnels it into the Cloud Server of Microsoft and Amazon. Like Microsoft, BASF also has its own app called Xarvio,  run by Microsoft or by Bayer and BASF which identifies weeds, diseases, insects in farms field, and predicts when they would become a problem. to. They use cloud computing platforms of Amazon web services. One of the biggest big tech companies that controls the world’s cloud service and is ahead of Microsoft, Google and Alibaba.

In 2024, the major platforms, like Alibaba, Amazon, Google and Microsoft alone, accounted for 67 Percent of revenue accruing from Global Cloud infrastructure Services. Similarly, Yara, which is one of the largest fertilizer companies in the world, offers a whole set of digital tools to assist farmers fertilizer needs such as the YaralRix, a tool for precision farming that allows farmers to measure crop and nitrogen requirements using their smartphones. It allows farmers to analyse their fields with satellite images and selectively apply fertilizer. Many leading food and beverages processors companies already control Digital Data for raw materials or sourcing processing marketing and delivery.

In this process, data has become a major driver of consolidation. This integration is getting more and more strengthened through corporate partnerships, mergers, and takeovers, creating the possibilities for a much more profound and complete control capture of food system. 

So here the question arises and this is one of the most important questions: who owns and controls  agricultural data generated through digitalization by big tech and agribusiness corporations. 

In fact, when India signed the MoU with big tech companies, like Microsoft, Amazon, and Cisco, one of the activist group in India called ASHA, which is an alliance for sustainable and holistic agriculture,  raised this issue of privacy and data ownership, and in a letter to the Prime Minister, they said that this new development is taking place in a policy vacuum with respect to data privacy of farmers and their related issues.  Till today, India’s does not have a law regarding control and ownership of digital data. Therefore, it’s very important to know where all the data is getting stored, who owns it and who has control over this data. In December 2018 in a speech by one of India’s multinational company CEO, Mukesh Ambani, demanded that Indian government prevent corporates, especially global corporations from owning Indian data. He said data colonialism is an as bad as previous forms of colonization. Data freedom is as precious as freedom we gained in 1947.

Another example in India, when Farmers buy equipment like tractors from John Deere, the farmers must sign up for certain conditions with respect to data that John Deere will gather from the tractor. Farmers sign up a license to operate the vehicle but they are not the owners of the equipment, the software embedded in it, or the data generated by the equipment. In addition, farmers are sometimes forbidden from repairing their own equipment. Their own tractors with they have bought. It has become illegal for farmers or independent technicians to tinker with embedded software, which is considers proprietary. This raises a number of concerns about losing control and ownership over both data and the tools used in farming. 

We have witnessed a big challenge to this monopolization of data or digital agriculture system by farmers in India. In 2021 India witnessed a massive mobilization of farmers across the country and the capital city of Delhi witnessed one of the largest and longest form of protest in the history of Modern India. Apparently, the farmers opposed  the three farm legislations brought out by the government, which they believed are meant to benefit Indian agribusiness. But they were also opposing the increasing monopoly by the big tech companies and agribusiness over food and agriculture, because some of the provisions of the three legislations tried to accelerate Agri-Tech and agribusiness  monopoly through setting up electronic trading platforms and promoting  digital and smart farming initiatives. 

The Impact on the  Energy Sector

There are two types of relationships between data and energy. One is the data driven energy production and the other one is related to  energy consumption of the data centres. Sofia Scaserra, researcher at Transnational Institute (TNI), exposed this nexus very clearly about energy and data in a colonializing point of view. 

The first thing to understand is, on how energy transition in the global South is done especially through colonialism. The energy transition using digital transformation has been creating colonialism from the north to the Global South by appropriating the data and raw materials, that can push and boost the energy productions in the world. Developing countries are being ‘forced’ to realize energy transition and privatized this under the control of corporations. 

With digital transformation the energy sector can take their own decisions based on data and information. It is because the appropriation of the intelligence and information by the big tech companies that they can  control the energy sector. When  energy is being produced worldwide, more and more the energy decisions are being taken by data, like streamlined refinery and distribution process, efficiency, monitoring energy and energy consumption, the increase oversight and ability to perform predictive maintenance and ensuring safety,   comes from the data-driven supply chain management. 

Thus data is being colonialized and  kept by a handful of big techs companies that collaborate with the energy companies. This collaboration will create a new dependency where finally the developing countries once again lose their sovereignty and technological capacities to pursue the energy transition. 

Now, this is not the only relationship between data and energy. There is also a relationship between energy and data centres. It is about the energy that has been consumed by having data centres in the world. First, not all data is being used. We store humongous amount of useless data in the world, and this is a really important issue, because many of the big tech companies, do not even know where the data exactly is and how much of that is really being used. They don’t even erase the data.

Data is being accumulated worldwide in different data centres. The data centres consume a lot of energy and it is becoming a really big problem for the environment worldwide. Data centres need some environmental standards and conditions to create ideal conditions for their operations. For example, heat and humidity could be a threat to the continuous operation of servers. In additions, continuous access to power and water are essential for their operation.

This fact has had major consequence in some countries such as Singapore or Islands where the power consumption of data centres is increasingly high. It has been putting a risk to the energy supply of the population. In the case of Singapore, as a key country for technological development in Asia Pacific, has established a moratorium from 2018 that suspends installation of new data centres in the country on the electric grid and the increase in carbon emissions. Today, there are several projects in Singapore that seeks to incorporate renewable energies and make better use of resources and maintenance of data centres where they aim the lifting of the moratorium soon. 

The truth is a data centres maintenance consumed two fundamental resources, that is energy to keep them running; and water to cool them like the cooling systems in large office Buildings.  The storage industry reliance on water is putting the digital business at risk. That is why the big tech companies are engaged in   huge propaganda about green energy, and the importance a quick energy transition. 

Another example is the Netherlands. Netherlands is a huge data centres and it has the exchange points of information that enter  Europe inside the Netherlands. The large amount of energy consumed by the storage industry has made companies concerned about using green energy. Today, 86 percent of the data centres in the Netherlands are supported by renewable energy. It generates a trade-off between electricity consumption to support households and industrial consumption and the energy consumed by these data centres. 

Big Techs Lobby on Global Digital Rules

The big tech companies are playing a big role in the digital transformation agenda and are pushing for digital and E-commerce rules that are occurring in a variety of trade negotiations. Jane Kelsey, a professor emeritus at the University of Auckland, shared her perspectives on the big techs lobby to liberalize data. 

So why opt for trade rules? 

The big tech companies were worried that the obvious place for developing global rules to deal with the digital domain was the international telecommunications union. It didn’t like that. The big techs would push the public trade rules, bilateral or even multilateral, as the basis of regulation which has a binding and enforceable aspect, and negotiated these in secret.

On top of the list was the right to control data. It is because data is the fuel for the digital economy and the digital domain, and who controls data, essentially can dominate that digital domain. Therefore, they wanted absolute rights to control the data generated in the business. The big tech companies also want that they are  not required  to be held locally responsible inside the country where they function. They do not want that country to even get  a copy of their data. By not using local computing facilities, such as local servers, they take advantage of their economies of scale but also locate themselves in jurisdictions that have minimal regulation and to effectively evade regulations and its enforcement in the source countries of the data. 

Other regulations that the big tech companies  avoid are the obligation to disclose the source code and algorithms, tax and competition regulators, local presence and content requirements, technology transfer requirements, and no limits on the royalties in the context of financial services as they are often located in tax haven countries. This model is being promoted as a model of corporate sovereignty.

In the context of tax issues,  new rules that are being developed dealing with the fact that big tech companies are the tax evaders. For example, last year, Apple’s retail division made profits of nearly 1,000 million pounds and paid tax less than 1 million pounds. Another one is that Amazon reported record profits, during the Covid19 pandemic, 75% higher than its previous record, and paid just six percent of those profits came into the US.

All these regulations are trying to be negotiated in a breakaway group in the World Trade Organization under the WTO plurilateral E-commerce agreement, and in several trade agreements like US driven Indo-Pacific Economic Framework under the pillar one, Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), EU FTAs, and other bilateral and regional agreements. 

In fact, the G20 forum is an important place to try to advance these rules model. The key players in addition to the US, EU, Japan, Singapore, Australia are all there in the G20, which is, of course, also a major supporter the basic model subject to individual sovereignty over data. In 2019 when Japan was hosting the G20, they had a side meeting that produced what was called the Osaka declaration about data flows with trust. But of course, free data flows with trust is not about the digital corporations being trustworthy. It was about digital consumers and sellers having confidence in the track transactions that were being conducted online.

It was interesting that some countries that are also important players in the G20 developing countries did not support the G20 proposal such as, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Egypt. These countries did not participate in that process. Several of those countries including others within the ASEAN region also resisted those rules in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) on the digital trade chapter. There does not have the rule on source code or local content rules. It does have rules on data transfer or rules on what are called data localization. In a self-judging way for national security reasons and the chapter is not enforceable.

The big Tech companies have strong influence lobbies in the trade negotiating arena. As having the biggest lobbying budgets in the EU and in the US, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook meta, and their trade group, spent almost 95 million dollars in lobbying. Being since 2021 roughly three times on what they spent 10 years ago. And, over 70% of lobbyists, for Google and meta, have formally worked for government bodies in the EU and member state level bodies. 

So, it’s vital to have strong public scrutiny and voices challenging the power of big tech companies and ensuring the governments do not sign up to these digital trade rules driven by the big techs’ interests.

What Can Be Done by  People’s Movements?

Knowledge building within the movement to understand the fundamental problem of digital colonization in all sectors becomes important. The awareness raising will lead the movement to the needs of policy development in protecting their rights over data. Public law on the right of data should be pushed to the governments and not only limited to individual data, but also to broader public data that has been controlled by the big tech companies. Preventing the states ratifying international trade agreements on digital and data privacy should become a strong demand by the people. Lastly, developing an alternative digital infrastructure that is owned and controlled by the people is essential to show the sovereignty of data and using it in a collective way. ****