The Inniss Data Nullius Framework: Contesting Vacant Data Claims in Global South Digital Governance

This paper introduces the Inniss Data Nullius Framework — a legal-doctrinal instrument identifying and contesting the treatment of Global South data as ownerless, jurisdiction-free, and freely appropriable. Drawing on the colonial doctrine of terra nullius and its repudiation in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) [1992] HCA 23, the framework argues that digital infrastructures reproduce an analogous fiction of vacancy over data, erasing the authorship, sovereignty, and economic value of data generated by Global South states. Three pillars operationalize this fiction: legal instruments circumventing local jurisdiction; technical architectures removing data from regulatory reach; and institutional silence, perpetuated by the Execution Gap — the failure to translate governance commitments into operational reality. Legal-doctrinal and policy-actionable where data colonialism scholarship is sociological, the framework advances the Principle of Data Reversion and recommendations for governments, regional bodies, and judicial institutions in the Caribbean and Global South, filling a documented gap in digital sovereignty literature.