When you scroll through social media or use a free app, you’re probably not thinking about colonialism. But, according to communication researcher Dr. Toussaint Nothias, maybe you should be.
As big tech companies expand their reach into developing countries, they’re following a playbook that looks surprisingly familiar to historians. It’s a pattern that Dr. Nothias and other scholars have been tracking with growing concern.
“The legacy of colonial power shapes the entire playbook at the heart of the expansion of tech power,” Dr. Nothias explains, “from the discourse of benevolence used by tech leaders to how their products enact logics of extraction, exploitation, and global inequalities.”
More Than Just Biased Algorithms
We often hear about AI bias and problematic algorithms, but Dr. Nothias says we need to think bigger. The problem isn’t just in the code—it’s in the entire approach.
“There’s been a very interesting wave of scholarship that explores the dynamics between tech power and the legacy of colonialism,” he notes. Researchers from fields as diverse as communication, law, computer science, anthropology, and sociology are connecting the dots between historical colonization and today’s digital expansion.
The parallels are striking. Where European powers once claimed to bring “civilization” to colonized regions, today’s tech giants frame their global expansion as bringing digital opportunity to “underserved” markets. The language has changed, but the power dynamics remain uncomfortably similar.
Take “zero-rating,” a practice you’ve probably never heard of if you live in the US or Europe but it’s shaping how most of the world experiences the internet.
Dr. Nothias defines zero-rating as “providing free of data charge access to specific online services. When connectivity is zero-rated, users are able to access a website without incurring data charges.” He explains that “throughout the majority of the world where most people access the internet via mobile phones, zero-rating is endemic.”
Facebook’s Free Basics program (previously called Internet.org) is the poster child for these initiatives. While the company celebrates connecting millions of new users to the internet, Dr. Nothias points to a troubling revelation.
“In 2022, the Wall Street Journal revealed that due to technical issues, some users using Facebook’s ‘free’ version were in fact charged,” he says. “According to the internal documents reviewed by the journalists, people in impoverished countries who had been promised free access ended up paying collectively about $7.8 million per month for the period July 2020 to 2021 alone, nearly $100 million in a single year.”
This isn’t just a technical glitch—it’s a case study in what can go wrong when technology is deployed without proper oversight. As Dr. Nothias warns, “At a time when tech companies aggressively roll out ‘free’ generative AI tools and oppose anti-monopoly cases by claiming their products are ‘free,’ my work on zero-rating offers a cautionary tale why we should never conflate free of charge and free.”
Following the Global Trail
Dr. Nothias’s research focuses particularly on “Global South contexts (particularly the role of US tech companies in Africa)” and “foregrounds the history of global inequalities that shape our current digital ecosystem.”
His work reveals how tech companies often enter markets with limited regulatory oversight, extract valuable user data, and impose cultural norms embedded in their platforms’ design—echoing colonial patterns of resource extraction and cultural imposition.
When Silicon Valley-based companies approach global markets with priorities of scale, disruption, and standardization, they often miss what local communities actually need and value.
The Information Gap
So what can be done? For starters, we need way more transparency.
Dr. Nothias describes a revealing challenge from his own research: “To get information as basic as ‘Where did Facebook launch their Free Basics product,’ I had to use a VPN over several months to independently monitor the availability of the product in different parts of the world. Such information—which took me hours of work over months—could have been provided by the company at no cost in a handful of minutes.”
He argues that “just like there are regulatory authorities providing basic information about newspaper circulation and TV viewership, we need to develop more institutional mechanisms that allow researchers and practitioners to better understand and independently analyze the social impact of digital technologies.”
Learning from the Front Lines
Another crucial step is listening to the people most directly affected by these technologies.
Dr. Nothias—who is a professor in NYU’s program in Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement (XE)—emphasizes “how essential it is for scholars to be in conversation with practitioners, activists and community members.” These front-line workers have “uniquely valuable expertise to capture the pulse of these transformations.”
“I have organized for content moderators and former delivery drivers to give talks to my students,” he shares. “Students found these interactions to be exceptionally insightful; they provided an essential perspective that enriched their learning in ways that reading academic articles simply do not.”
Perhaps most telling, Dr. Nothias observed that “digital rights activists from the Global South had been developing and popularizing these ideas for many; in many ways, they inspired the current wave of critical scholarship.” The people experiencing these issues firsthand recognized the patterns long before they became academic talking points.
Looking Ahead
As AI and other emerging technologies reshape our world, learning from the zero-rating experience becomes ever more urgent. When tech companies pitch their newest “free” products, we’d do well to remember that free rarely comes without costs—especially for the most vulnerable.
By recognizing these colonial patterns in modern technology, we can work toward digital systems that actually serve diverse human needs rather than reproducing historical inequalities.
The challenge is massive, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. Creating technology that breaks free from colonial legacies rather than reinforcing them may be one of the defining issues of our digital age.
— Mythili Sampathkumar