(2025) 6 TWAIL Review 108-132
ISSN 2563-6693
Published under a Creative Commons licence. 

Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT) is a global data governance concept being advocated by the World Economic Forum. This paper examines the regime and argues that it is antithetical to the economic development of Third World countries. The paper equates data to a natural resource found within the territory of a nation and equates cyber sovereignty to permanent sovereignty. It argues that the benefits, mining, and transfer of data should be for the promotion of the national economic development of the State and its peoples as provided for under Paragraph 1 of the Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, United Nations General Assembly resolution 1803 (XVII) of 14 December 1962. Using a purposive analysis method, the paper scrutinizes international reports on digital developments worldwide, United Nations documents, texts on international law and digital economy to establish that given the global North’s advanced digital evolution and sophistication in digital technology, they currently stand to benefit more from DFFT and a universal regulation of data than the global South who are currently in the nascent stages of development as regards their digital laws, institutions, infrastructure, knowledge, and skills. The contribution of this paper is the exploration of the nexus between the regulation of natural resources in international law and the global regulation of data from a Third World perspective. The paper concludes that at the current stage of their digital development, it is more beneficial for Third World countries to adopt their own domestic data governance regime and to enter into digital economy agreements (DEAs) than subscribing to DFFT or any other global date governance regime.