In a study on development and growth, Steven Weber75 describes the economic imbalance that can result when one side (the colonized) provides the “raw” data, and the other does all the capturing, the processing, the analysis, and the creation of value-added products that the colonized cannot develop on their own and which they must buy at a disadvantage. As has been the case throughout the history of colonialism, this results in the colonizers becoming richer and more powerful, and the colonized underdeveloped and dependent. “The users in [disadvantaged] countries get to consume the products but are shut out of the value-add production side of the data economy,” Weber writes.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 333