The Bahamas Minister of Economic Affairs, Jerome Fitzgerald, is calling on Caribbean countries to establish a regional digital sovereignty pact and jointly develop cloud and computing infrastructure.
Addressing the four-day 41st CANTO Annual Conference, which ends here later on Wednesday, Fitzgerald said that the region risks exchanging traditional forms of economic dependency for a new era of ‘digital colonisation’. He told the conference being held under the theme ‘Elevate the Caribbean: From Connectivity to Global Competitiveness’ that Caribbean governments must adopt a coordinated approach to negotiations with global technology companies and data center investors so as to ensure the region maintains control over its data, infrastructure and intellectual property.
‘First, establish a Caribbean digital sovereignty compact , a regional floor for data center incentives, resource obligations, cybersecurity, data protection, government cloud contracts, portability, and disaster recovery. No investor should be able to play one Caribbean country against another for strategic resources.’
Fitzgerald is also proposing the creation of a federated Caribbean cloud and compute network, with resilient infrastructure distributed across several Caribbean jurisdictions and connected through multiple submarine cables.
‘Our risk will be distributed, and our sovereignty should be too,’ he said, noting that greater access to fiber networks, cloud computing and artificial intelligence should not automatically be interpreted as the development of domestic technological capacity.
‘Digital consumption is not digital sovereignty. Connectivity is not capability. Hosting is not ownership. And dependence does not become development merely because the dependency is fast.’
Fitzgerald questioned whether Caribbean governments are receiving sufficient long-term economic benefits in exchange for concessions and access to land, electricity and water making reference to the development of data centers.
‘After the concessions are counted and the electricity is supplied, what capability, ownership, resilience, tax revenue, and recurring value will remain with us? Should we give the land, provide the power, supply the water, build the road, grant the concessions, and then pay rent to use services generated from our own resources while the knowledge and profits leave our shores? The decisions we make will determine whether this is truly a digital transformation, or simply an extraction agreement with a different branding.’
Fitzgerald said fragmentation among Caribbean countries weakens their ability to negotiate with major technology companies and investors, telling delegates ‘alone, each island approaches a platform as a customer. Together, we approach it as a market.
‘Alone, each government bargains for a facility. Together, we can bargain for an ecosystem.
‘Alone, we ask for access. Together, we can require reciprocal agreements,’ Fitzgerald said, calling for major government technology contracts to include requirements for open standards, usable data exports, independent audits, Caribbean-controlled encryption, exit rights and knowledge transfer.
‘Public money must purchase public capability,’ Fitzgerald said, noting also that artificial intelligence (AI) creates another avenue through which the Caribbean’s culture, knowledge and intellectual property could generate economic value overseas.
‘If our collective life improves a commercial model, the Caribbean must benefit from the value chain,’ he said, noting that Caribbean health records, agricultural knowledge, speech patterns, music, archives and images should be treated as economic, cultural and national security assets.
The Bahamian minister called for the development of Caribbean datasets, AI evaluation standards, models and research institutions; and proposed a Caribbean artificial intelligence laboratory owned by the region that could train models using Caribbean languages, archives and historical information.
‘We should use these global tools, but we must also build Caribbean datasets, evaluation standards, models, and research institutions. We must be authors of technology, not merely subjects inside it.’
Fitzgerald said his position should not be interpreted as opposition to foreign investment.
‘Post-colonial does not mean anti-foreign. It means anti-subordination. It does not mean rejecting capital. It means disciplining capital toward sustainable development in our national and regional interest,’ he said, promising that the matter will receive greater international attention when The Bahamas hosts the World Telecommunication and ICT Policy Forum in Nassau from September 1 to 4.
‘The issue before us is no longer whether the Caribbean will become digital. It will. The issue is who, in the digital Caribbean, will hold the keys, and whether the Caribbean truly remains sovereign.’