All you really need is a population that needs access to certain infrastructure - cell phone networks, broadband services, etc - but that cannot pay for these things with their own income, so they have to take on debt. The debt can be rolled over, but never completely purged. As long as you can service the debt, you can get the access to infrastructure you need, but you'll always be in a subservient position.

AT&T's new data pricing scheme strikes me as a form of this - or at least a 21st century version of sharecropping.

And the world will live as one