digital colonialism
The idea that a few very large and powerful entities have taken control of the majority of the technology market, especially the internet and the places where people spend their time and money online. Much like Western European colonizers made homes on the land of indigenous peoples and eventually dominated them economically and physically, companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google and telecoms like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T own and control the majority of the physical infrastructure (servers, data centers, fiber network backbones) and have driven smaller, locally owned and operated data centers and service providers toward extinction.
Related: digital rentier capitalism
The exploited laborers are the people of color extracting the minerals in the Congo and Latin America, the armies of cheap labor annotating artificial intelligence data in China and Africa and the Asian workers suffering from PTSD after cleansing social media platforms of disturbing content. The platforms and spy centers (like the NSA) are the panopticons, and data is the raw material processed for artificial intelligence-based services.
This idea becomes evident in the example of Google's web search product. It slurps up all the public data it can find by crawling the web, then Google profits from it by selling ads without compensating the creators. Another is OpenAI, who make massive models for generating "original" visual art, programming code, writing and music by analyzing data sets that often appear to have been blindly scraped from the internet and include work that was not licensed for such uses. Then they sell these models and tools as products.
[It's about] entrenching an unequal division of labor, where the dominant powers have used their ownership of digital infrastructure, knowledge and their control of the means of computation to keep the [Global] South in a situation of permanent dependency.
Also related: data sovereignty