EU-South Korea digital trade pact entrenches neoliberal data colonialism, sidelining sovereignty and labor rights in Global South
Original framing: “EU and South Korea deepen ties with digital pact to bolster trade - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Digital trade pacts mirror 19th-century colonial infrastructure projects, where railroads and telegraphs facilitated resource extraction under 'modernization' narratives. The EU-Korea pact echoes the 2016 EU-Canada CETA, which included investor-state dispute mechanisms favoring tech corporations. Historical precedents show how bilateral deals often precede labor deregulation and privatization in the Global South.
The EU-South Korea digital pact exemplifies how neoliberal trade regimes weaponize 'innovation' to deepen corporate control over data, while sidelining the Global South's digital sovereignty and labor rights.
Historically, such agreements have served as Trojan horses for extractive capitalism, from 19th-century telegraph networks to today's cloud infrastructure. Indigenous epistemologies and Southern labor movements offer radical alternatives—data as commons, not commodity—but are systematically excluded from trade negotiations. The pact's trickster-like obfuscation of power (e.g., framing corporate data flows as 'trade facilitation') reveals the absurdity of treating digital rights as a technical issue rather than a political one. True systemic change requires dismantling the structural inequalities embedded in these deals, replacing them with governance models rooted in communal consent and public ownership.