GET OFF THE BIG DATA PARTNERSHIP BANDWAGON

The Internet is a leveller, or so we imagined. Back in 2003, the World Summit on the Information Society, in its Declaration of Principles, expressed a shared commitment to build a “people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society”. Partnerships, technology transfer and capacity building were seen as crucial for promoting global participation in the information society. Little did we anticipate that the Internet, an innovation with the potential to bring the world closer, would become a handmaiden of transnational capitalism.

In a matter of a decade, the Internet paradigm has traversed a huge distance. We have seen the power of platforms — Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the GAFA foursome — unleash market control that is unprecedented. While these companies have grown their own product ecosystems through Artificial Intelligence, monopsonies (single buyers) like Amazon are now drawing upon machine learning to offer digital intelligence services to less tech-savvy enterprises to implement AI technology. Through a combination of mobile phone networks, Internet of Things and cloud technologies, a handful of digital corporations are attempting to build intelligence infrastructure that is tipped to transform society in a profoundly systemic way.

With the exception of China, developing countries in the global south have been tardy in preparing for the infrastructural, financial, knowledge and institutional wherewithal to enter the era of digital intelligence. This gap — referred to glibly as the digital divide — has direct consequences for development in the digital age, with a dependence on foreign corporations.

The ideas of technology transfer and capacity building in international development have proven to be a decoy for dominant economic actors in development to push market liberalisation. Corporation has always been the centrepiece in the political economy of ‘technology transfer’.

As the tour de force of the informa-

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MARCH 15: Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said in Parliament today (March 14) that the joint draft treaty of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons prepared by the US and Russia was "not to our satisfaction”, but she did not close the door against India's signing it.