The Architecture Of Dominance: Big Tech, Digital Colonialism And The Search For A Rights-Based Regulatory Order
- IJLLR Journal
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
Rishika Bahri, Amity Law School, Amity University, Noida
ABSTRACT
The twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of a small number of technology corporations principally Meta, Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple and ByteDance as quasi-sovereign actors exercising unprecedented regulatory, economic and epistemic power across national borders. This paper examines the intersection of three critical dimensions of this phenomenon: the theoretical construct of digital colonialism, the human rights consequences of unregulated platform power, and the architecture of international economic law as an enabler of corporate dominance. Drawing upon critical political economy, postcolonial legal theory and doctrinal analysis of Indian and international law, the paper advances three principal arguments.
First, that the contemporary digital economy reproduces and extends colonial structures of extraction and domination, constituting what may be described as digital colonialism; second, that Big Tech corporations function as neo- imperial actors whose operations directly implicate the full spectrum of human rights, including the rights to privacy, freedom of expression, equality and development; and third, that the prevailing framework of international economic law comprising WTO e-commerce disciplines, TRIPS obligations, digital trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties operates as an architecture of digital empire, constraining the regulatory sovereignty of states in the Global South. The paper pays particular attention to the constitutional and regulatory framework of India, examining landmark judicial precedents including Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v Union of India and Shreya Singhal v Union of India, as well as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021.
In its conclusions, the paper calls for a human rights regulatory approach in both international and national arenas to support binding human rights due diligence requirements for businesses, human rights carve-out provisions in digital trade agreements, and a robust national data protection and competition policy for India.
Keywords: Digital Colonialism; Big Tech Regulation; Human Rights and Technology; Surveillance Capitalism; Platform Governance; International Economic Law; Data Sovereignty; Indian Constitutional Law; Privacy; Freedom of Expression.
