Abstract: Facing the new development of capitalist society under big data technology， leftist scholars Couldry and Mejias proposed the concept of “cloud empire”， thinking that the cloud empire composed of various large digital companies is implementing a kind of new colonization method with data extraction technology， that is data colonization. The emergence of the cloud empire made people's daily life capitalized and become a raw material that could be plundered by the cloud empire. It also brought more serious inequality problems and the loss of people's life autonomy. Couldry and Mejias continued the Marxist tradition of economic analysis in form， but the two have some fundamental misunderstandings and deviations from the application of classic writer theory， thus leading to theoretical defects that are difficult to bridge. Therefore， the concept of “cloud empire” is essentially just a theoretical proposition like “Marxism” but not “Marxism”.

Key words: cloud empire; data colonialism; data relations; daily life capitalization; digital imperialism