11-16, 10:30–11:00 (Asia/Beirut), The in Between
This session will revolve around the recent trend of foreign Big Tech companies constructing data centers and cloud regions in the GCC countries. It will look into the consequences of data being hosted in data centers within certain jurisdictions, in light of the weak data protection laws implemented by authoritarian governments in the Gulf. As many GCC countries are planning to digitally transform their institutions and governments, and many Big Tech companies’ (such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Huawei) are directly and indirectly contributing to this transformation, the session will discuss the human rights concerns related to this.
The first half of the session (15 min) will be a presentation of a research project by SMEX on the topic, presented by Aksel Eck. Then, there will be room for questions, discussion and suggestions.
I am a Norwegian student of International Relations (Universitat Ramon Llull, Blanquerna in Barcelona), specializing in International Political Economy. This semester I am interning in the research unit at SMEX, where my main task is to develop a research about Big Tech data center infrastructure in the MENA region.