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The rapid development of the Internet as well as of other information and communication technology (ICT) has led to increased electronic cross-border delivery of services and digital products such as sound recordings, audiovisual works, video games, computer software and literary works. While regional trade agreements increasingly innovate as regar...
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... 4. The literature also suggests that the attention has shifted over time from the WTO to PTAs as the prime location for rule-making resulting from diverging interests among WTO Members. In line with increasing politicization in the context of the WTO, we also witness PTA commitments that vary considerably (Wu, 2017;Wunsch-Vincent and Hold, 2016). 5. To a certain extent, the diverging PTA templates reflect what Aaronson and Leblond (2018) refer to as a 'new digital divide'. ...
For a long time, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been seen as the privileged multilateral regime to regulate trade. However, given its slow progress in negotiating new trade rules, countries have increasingly shifted their focus to preferential trade agreements (PTAs) since the early 2000s. Focusing on a timely and increasingly important topic (digital trade), we explore how countries’ interactions in the WTO impact on their approaches in designing rules in PTAs. Using newly collected data on digital trade‐related provisions in almost 350 PTAs signed since 2000, we find that countries’ participation in digital trade‐related initiatives at the WTO spill over to the design of their PTAs. More precisely, we show that countries which actively participate in the discussions of the WTO Work Programme on Electronic Commerce are more likely to negotiate ambitious commitments on digital trade in their PTAs. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that countries which participate in the WTO‐based plurilateral Information Technology Agreement (ITA) are more likely to commit to deeper cooperation in the area of digital trade. More broadly, this article contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of regime complexity and how interaction in the multilateral system spills over to regional and bilateral trade regimes. Given that the EU, China and others differ in their regulatory approach towards digital trade, it can well be that e‐commerce debates in the WTO will become increasingly salient and politicized over time.
... Many other issues, although discussed in the framework of the 1998 WTO Work Programme on Electronic Commerce, have been left without a solution or even a clarification. 48 For instance and as a minimum for advancing on the digital trade agenda, there is still no agreement on a permanent moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions and their content. 49 Against the backdrop of pre-Internet WTO law and despite the recent reinvigoration of the e-commerce negotiations under the 2019 Joint Statement Initiative, 50 many of the disruptive changes underpinning the data-driven economy have demanded regulatory solutions outside the ailing multilateral trade forum. ...
This collection explores the relevance of global trade law for data, big data and cross-border data flows. Contributing authors from different disciplines including law, economics and political science analyze developments at the World Trade Organization and in preferential trade venues by asking what future-oriented models for data governance are available and viable in the area of trade law and policy. The collection paints the broad picture of the interaction between digital technologies and trade regulation as well as provides in-depth analyses of critical to the data-driven economy issues, such as privacy and AI, and different countries' perspectives. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
... The regulatory environment for digital trade has been substantially influenced by free trade agreements (FTAs) and in particular by those led by the United States. The United States has endorsed and attempted to ensure implementation of its so-called 'Digital Agenda' (Wunsch-Vincent 2003) through the FTA channel. The agreements reached since 2002 with Australia, Bahrain, Chile, Morocco, Oman, Peru, Singapore, the Central American countries, Panama, Colombia and South Korea, and most recently with Canada and Mexico under the renegotiated NAFTA, all contain critical WTO-plus (going above the WTO commitments) and WTO-extra (addressing issues not covered by the WTO) provisions in the broader field of digital trade. ...
The chapter provides an overview of the current and emerging trends in disruptive technologies and thematizes the sweeping effects of digitization at different levels of the economy. The chapter's focus then shifts to the effects of digitization on trade and explores the implications for trade policy. In order to understand what needs to be changed or at least calibrated in existing external trade policies, we need to know what we have in terms of existing regulatory frameworks – both at the international and at the regional and bilateral levels. It is the objective of the chapter’s third part to attend to this need, as well as to show how selected countries have responded to the digital challenge and formulated distinct or less distinct responses in their respective external trade policies. Here, in particular an understanding of the digital agenda of the United States, as well as of the new templates for electronic commerce, is essential and this chapter will convey this knowledge by focusing on the most advanced model so far - that of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The chapter goes on to contextualize and assess the impact of the existing legal frameworks, as shaped by preferential trade agreements.
... 103 Many other issues discussed in the framework of the 1998 WTO Work Programme on Electronic Commerce have been left without a solution or even a clarification. 104 There is, for instance, still no agreement on a permanent duty-free moratorium on electronic transmissions. 105 The lack of progress under the WTO has triggered forum-shopping -through bilateral, regional and plurilateral initiatives. ...
Digital technologies, taken as a broad generic category of technological inventions and applications, fall under a rare kind of 'disruptive technologies' that can radically change existing economic sectors, enable new modes of work, production and consumption and trigger broader societal transformations. To make apt policy decisions, there is a distinct need to understand what these technologies and their effects actually are and how they may develop over time. This study attends to this need in particular with regard to the implications of digital technologies for EU's external trade policies. It accentuates the critical importance of data and cross-border data flows for the emergent digital economy and underscores the need to appropriately address them with a calibrated and more proactive positioning of the EU in international trade venues.
... The spillovers of the trade versus culture dilemma cause profound legal uncertainty and upset the potency of the WTO to react in a forward looking manner to the deep changes in international trade caused by digital technologies (Chander 2013), and hinder linkages to global Internet governance institutions and debates. This also, and only naturally so, leads to forum shopping and a move (particularly driven by the United States) to bilateral or regional venues, the impact of which may be precarious, if not to say detrimental, to achieving any public interest objectives (WunschVincent and Hold 2012;Burri 2015). The cultural proponents have organized their efforts differently 8 and sought new institutional solutions outside the WTO framework—through the adoption of the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity in 2005. ...
The article provides a comparison between the conventional venues of cultural policy-making, such as the World Trade Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and the newly emerged fora of global Internet governance. It juxtaposes the different actors, levels of legalization and institutionalization, the different decision-making mechanisms, the different framing of cultural diversity issues and the broader rhetorical and policy contexts. The article exposes the existing disconnect between these and ultimately reveals the ongoing marginalization of cultural concerns at the global level, as well as the inability of states as policy entrepreneurs to react to the changing regulatory environment.
... So, far the WTO has not been able to address any of these issues. 63 At the same time, it should be acknowledged that the picture has changed in many critical respects since the Work Programme on E-Commerce was launched in 1998. The significance of digital trade, both in its contribution to the economic growth of many countries and the preoccupation of governments with Internet-related policies, has grown exponentially. ...
This chapter seeks to fill some gaps in the literature, as well as in policy discourse, by addressing those aspects of international trade law that are of immediate relevance for the current state and evolution of Internet Governance. It maps all pertinent provisions of the World Trade Organizations, as well as the more recent and further reaching rules found in preferential trade agreements.
The chapter thematizes the problem of interfacing different policy domains that may come with very different objectives, actors, regulatory histories and cultures, such as notably those of trade and Internet governance, as well as the challenge of updating legal frameworks in the face of new technological developments.
... The electronic commerce instance is illustrative of the negative spillovers of the cultural exception debate, which prevent any practical solution in the short to medium term and leave the vital economic field of digital trade in a haze of uncertainty (although the US -Gambling rulings 12 have confirmed that WTO rules are applicable to electronically supplied services). The lack of a solution within the multilateral context of the WTO has also prompted members to take other, bilateral or regional, paths to advance their policy priorities (Wunsch-Vincent & Hold, 2012), and, overall, has led to increased fragmentation of rules and complexity in governance, which may render the protection of global public goods, such as cultural diversity, more difficult (Maskus & Reichman, 2005;Brousseau et al., 2012). Manifold proposals have been advanced in the literature to solve the 'culture versus trade' conundrum and make it more like 'culture and trade' (Burri, 2009, pp. ...
The intensified flows of goods, services, peoples and ideas across borders intrinsic to globalization have had multiple and multifaceted effects. Those affecting culture have perhaps been the most controversial, and certainly the most politically and even emotionally charged. The ‘trade and culture’ quandary, or, to phrase it perhaps more revealingly, ‘trade versus culture’ quandary, is a discussion that emerged in the forum of the WTO and its institutional predecessor, GATT. As is well documented, GATT came into being after World War II as a provisional agreement that was meant to eliminate trade discrimination and reduce tariffs and other barriers to trade, and over the years it grew into a de facto international organization with a substantial impact on trade-related issues (Jackson, 1997; Matsushita et al., 2006). The way in which the organization advanced its goals of liberalizing trade and opening up domestic markets was through the so-called negotiation rounds, during which the GATT members agreed to make concessions and establish rules to which they subsequently found themselves committed. The ‘trade and culture’ debate became truly conspicuous during one of these rounds of trade negotiations — the Uruguay Round — which was launched in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in 1986 and lasted until 1994. It was during this period that a number of countries, with France and Canada prominently featuring at the forefront, fought the so-called exception culturelle battle.
... The electronic commerce instance is illustrative of the negative spillovers of the cultural exception debate, which prevent any practical solution in the short to medium term and leave the vital economic field of digital trade in a haze of uncertainty (although the US -Gambling rulings 12 have confirmed that WTO rules are applicable to electronically supplied services). The lack of a solution within the multilateral context of the WTO has also prompted members to take other, bilateral or regional, paths to advance their policy priorities (Wunsch-Vincent & Hold, 2012), and, overall, has led to increased fragmentation of rules and complexity in governance, which may render the protection of global public goods, such as cultural diversity, more difficult (Maskus & Reichman, 2005;Brousseau et al., 2012). Manifold proposals have been advanced in the literature to solve the 'culture versus trade' conundrum and make it more like 'culture and trade' (Burri, 2009, pp. ...
This chapter is a contribution to the Palgrave Handbook of European Media Policy (co-edited by Pauwels, Donders & Loisen). It is the chapter’s purpose to examine the proponents of the cultural exception policy, their strategies and demands, and to explore how they came to be reflected in the law and policy of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The chapter also looks at the current state of affairs, as although WTO law has not undergone any substantial amendments since its entry into force in 1995, the media landscape has in the meantime been truly transformed, in some aspects in a revolutionary manner. The broader picture of global governance has not remained still either, with new and emergent powers, changing mechanisms of rule-making and taking.
The multilateral framework of the WTO, by virtue of its principles of non-discrimination, its transparency requirements, and its enforceability through the WTO dispute settlement system, has proven capable of facilitating global economic liberalisation in the industrial economy of the twentieth century. However, the incumbent system of international trade governance does not adequately address the socio-economic transformation and the complex trade policy challenges presented by a data-driven digital economy. The nexus of digital trade and data privacy in its conceptual ambiguity and polycentric normative underpinnings epitomizes the exigent challenges for trade governance in a global digital economy. This chapter examines and develops approaches for a recontextualisation of trade law against the backdrop of digital globalisation as well as for a reconciliation of digital trade and data privacy.
Given the heterogeneity of national data privacy standards, which have a significant impact on digital trade, the role of trade law in mitigating the resulting conflicts requires an in-depth examination. The analysis of the digital transformation of trade has revealed that a significant share of the regulatory challenges related to trade in the digital economy—notably the regulation of cross-border data flows—are inextricably linked to trade in services. This chapter will therefore examine potential conflicts between obligations under national data privacy regimes and multilateral trade law obligations as well as the regulatory responses of the GATS to the nexus of digital trade and data privacy. Furthermore, trade agreements that are currently serving as “laboratories” for the development of transnational data governance will be analysed with regard to their response to the nexus of digital trade and data privacy.
