The Internet is not a neutral space – on the contrary, tech expert Anasuya Sengupta, Robert Bosch Academy fellow, is researching how digital systems promote inequality and discrimination.

Free flow of information, decentralized and community-based – just a few decades ago, these were the guiding principles of the Internet. Yet things have worsened since then. Not only do a few corporations now dominate a large part of the internet, but the technologies used also reinforce unfairly concentrated power relations in increasingly violent ways. Anasuya Sengupta’s research shows how this monopoly of power also promotes discrimination in the analogue world. She is a tech expert and founder of the feminist initiative “Whose Knowledge?”. As a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, she focuses on digital law and the representation of knowledge of marginalized groups. In this interview, she explains how exactly digital systems can lead to greater justice – and what “Decolonizing the Internet” means in practice.