The Global South’s digital future must not belong to Bezos and Musk
Satellite internet can close the digital divide, but the Global South must not trade access for dependence on foreign corporations. Amazon recently announced that its
Satellite internet can close the digital divide, but the Global South must not trade access for dependence on foreign corporations. Amazon recently announced that its Leo satellite internet service is expected to enter South Africa in 2027 through Herotel, the country’s largest fixed internet provider. The partnership, Leo’s first agreement of its kind in Africa, will connect homes and businesses beyond the reach of fibre and fixed wireless networks. Herotel serves more than 350,000 customers in over 550 towns, giving Amazon a route into farming areas and rural communities where distance, terrain and sparse populations make conventional networks costly. Amazon is entering a market already being transformed by satellite internet. Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, served 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries and markets through about 9,000 satellites as of March, reflecting its rapid expansion throughout Africa, Latin America and Asia. Satellite services could bring coverage to underserved regions, but whether poorer households can afford them remains uncertain. Yet the promise of universal connectivity carries a deeper risk: The communities brought online by these services may become dependent on foreign corporations that control the infrastructure on which their economies and public life increasingly rely. Internet access shapes who can study, work, trade, bank, communicate, obtain public services and participate in political life. Network owners decide where they operate, how much people pay and the conditions under which they provide access. In September 2024, Starlink initially defied a Brazilian order to block X, another company controlled by Musk, before reversing course. The episode showed how essential networks give private firms extraordinary leverage over governments. Amazon and SpaceX are embedded in the national security infrastructure of the United States. SpaceX received a national security launch contract in 2025 covering an expected 28 missions with an anticipated value of $5.9bn to be awarded between the 2025 and 2029 fiscal years while Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides classified cloud services to US defence and intelligence agencies. Their infrastructure, therefore, is already intertwined with US state power. Entrusting them with essential networks across poorer countries would extend American strategic power into their economies, institutions and daily lives. Of the 2.2 billion people offline, 96 percent live in low- and middle-income countries.
Across Africa, only 36 percent use the internet, falling to 21 percent in rural communities. Fixed broadband, where available, costs more than one-quarter of the average monthly income in a low-income country. Satellite networks reach places neglected by fibre and mobile operators but cannot by themselves overcome the cost of data, devices and electricity. In Nigeria, Starlink raised its monthly residential fee by 50 percent in April 2025 from 38,000 to 57,000 naira ($28 to $42) after an earlier attempt to almost double it met regulatory resistance. A corporation setting those conditions exercises political power without democratic responsibility. That combination of foreign infrastructure and unaccountable authority has a colonial precedent in Africa. From 1890 to 1898, a Belgian company built the Matadi-Leopoldville railway to carry rubber and ivory from King Leopold II’s Congo Free State towards Europe. Congolese communities were forced to collect the resources it transported while the colonial regime controlled the route and captured the profits. Facebook later reproduced that logic digitally. On February 10, 2015, Facebook and Reliance Communications launched Internet.org in six Indian states before renaming the service Free Basics later that year. Selected news, health, education and employment websites carried no data charges while the wider internet cost money. For millions of poorer Indians coming online for the first time, Facebook risked becoming the internet itself while local businesses and media outside its portal competed against free services. The prospect provoked a nationwide campaign for net neutrality. Indian regulators ordered Reliance to suspend Free Basics in December 2015, then prohibited content-based data pricing in February 2016. The ruling prevented Facebook from turning poverty into the power to decide what people could read, learn, watch and buy online. India’s ruling did little to slow Free Basics elsewhere. By July 2019, it was reportedly available in 30 African countries, including Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. In Ghana, about 70 percent of its services were based outside Africa while major local news sites were absent. In Kenya, users could not reach eCitizen or Huduma Kenya, portals for obtaining identity documents, birth certificates and business registrations. Facebook’s free internet remained distinctly foreign and incomplete. Free Basics gave Facebook control over a single gateway to the internet. But corporate influence over connectivity increasingly extends beyond services to the infrastructure that carries them.
The BriefWire