Digital Colonialism and Critical Communication Infrastructures: Submarine Cables, Data and Power Routes in Brazil and Portugal
Digital Colonialism and Critical Communication Infrastructures: Submarine Cables, Data and Power Routes in Brazil and Portugal
Thursday, 10 July 2025: 15:45
Location: SJES005 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Oral Presentation
Within a society deeply based on data capture and predictive analysis of consumer behaviour, the ability to capture, analyse and manage personal digital data has become an immense source of power – in all its different forms.
In Digital Capitalism, users become the product. With every interaction on social networks, search bars or automatic acceptance of cookies, huge amounts of data are captured, analysed – and, what's more, sold by companies.
This data collection establishes a new relationship between companies and consumers – Datarelations – and sustains Data Colonialism, characterised by the combination of the predatory practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification of computational methods. It is a new type of appropriation, in which people or things have become part of the infrastructure of informational connection (Amadeu da Silva et al., 2019).
Nick Couldry (2021) defines Data Colonialism as ‘a new way of appropriating human life with its data extracted continuously for profit’. The idea of the absolute need for access to technology, immediate communication tools and social networks, for example, reinforce all the main points for easening data extraction, shaping this maintenance of digital colonialism.
Our focus goes on to one of the critical communication infrastructures – submarine cables The influence of submarine cables and their configuration in the geopolitical scene has undergone profound changes in recent years.
In this study, we discuss the Google-owned cables in Portugal and Brazil. Ownership of critical infrastructures allows companies to directly extract and capture user data, from which a discussion can be held over a possible change in the flow of data and in the characteristics of digital colonialism from a North-South axis to a flow with no predetermined direction – guided only by market needs, data governance and the imperialist impositions that investment in digital technologies presents.
In Digital Capitalism, users become the product. With every interaction on social networks, search bars or automatic acceptance of cookies, huge amounts of data are captured, analysed – and, what's more, sold by companies.
This data collection establishes a new relationship between companies and consumers – Datarelations – and sustains Data Colonialism, characterised by the combination of the predatory practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification of computational methods. It is a new type of appropriation, in which people or things have become part of the infrastructure of informational connection (Amadeu da Silva et al., 2019).
Nick Couldry (2021) defines Data Colonialism as ‘a new way of appropriating human life with its data extracted continuously for profit’. The idea of the absolute need for access to technology, immediate communication tools and social networks, for example, reinforce all the main points for easening data extraction, shaping this maintenance of digital colonialism.
Our focus goes on to one of the critical communication infrastructures – submarine cables The influence of submarine cables and their configuration in the geopolitical scene has undergone profound changes in recent years.
In this study, we discuss the Google-owned cables in Portugal and Brazil. Ownership of critical infrastructures allows companies to directly extract and capture user data, from which a discussion can be held over a possible change in the flow of data and in the characteristics of digital colonialism from a North-South axis to a flow with no predetermined direction – guided only by market needs, data governance and the imperialist impositions that investment in digital technologies presents.