The Global South’s digital future must not belong to Bezos and Musk

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.