Regulatory Sovereignty in India: Indigenizing CompetitionTechnology Approaches, ISAIL-TR-001
Digital Coloniality and Privatizing the Degradation of the First Principles Rights cum Economic Conditions Digital Coloniality, for the purposes of this report, is a tendency of gaining influence, in the cyberspace, through digital technologies, which become an important means to organize and systemically distribute whatever is considered as “power” through the control of access to knowledge, moral and artistic resources by the “dominant group”. Coloniality since is a modern concept, and is related to colonialism, implying that there should be some entity of foreign origin and basis (vicariously as well as absolutely), this sub-section does not specifically cover digital feudalism – the phenomenon that companies in the realm of digital technologies feudalise and derogate or undermine national sovereignty of their host state by their corporeal actions, which supersede the scope of their actions defined by the law of the host state, and to some limited extent, if necessary – international law. However, the role of international law in such affairs since is not clearly defined anywhere, apart from the call for adapting business practices, which are ethical, fair, and reasonable, there is nothing specific on digital coloniality in public and private international law literatures. We have therefore, assessed in this sub-section carefully, with an approach to suggest legal, principle-based and policy solutions in the further sections of the report accordingly. Digital coloniality is based on specific and planned actions, which can lead to serious issues of not just undermining state sovereignty, but it can also deprive the people, whose host state is being subjected to the same, through commercial and other kinds of operations, of their constitutional rights, recognized by their basic law & even human rights – of individual, social and economic nature, which are recognized under public international human rights law. The UNESCO Recommendation on AI Ethics of 2021 (UNESCO, 2021) takes into consideration the adverse impacts of algorithms, with 4 perspectives – ontology, pragmatism, epistemology and explanability. The preservation of human rights as recognized constitutional rights is always central to the onus of the host state, whose citizens are impacted by any activity. Now, it also must be determined whether actions by private actors such as technology companies
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