[Mira Burri is a senior fellow and lecturer in law at the University of Bern, Switzerland.]
In early October this year the World Trade Organization (WTO) held its annual Public Forum typically devoted to topics that are key to the world trading system and particularly high on the agenda of the community of the WTO’s 159 Members. The theme of this year’s edition was uniquely framed under ‘Expanding Trade through Innovation and the Digital Economy’. To some observers, the topic appeared somewhat detached from the WTO’s core mandate and daily business and distant from burning concerns, such as financial crisis responses, poverty or other development-oriented actions that demand the concerted effort of the global community.
Yet, the casual observer may be mistaken – at least in two aspects. The first is more evident and has to do with the deep impact that digital technologies, and specifically the Internet, have had and continue to have upon numerous facets of societal life. The associated transformations range from the trivial to the momentous – from online shopping, through the emergence of global value chains, to the very ways we work and write, create, distribute and access information − bringing distant geographical locations within instantaneous reach, millions of people organized within hours, encyclopaedias and virtual libraries produced on a collaborative basis. The world of brick-and-mortar trade, of freighter shipments, border inspections, duties and stamps, has also been thereby profoundly changed. For the first time is trade in services unleashed on a global scale, and this definitively goes beyond the classic ‘the world is flat’ example of outsourcing call-centres to India.
The second aspect is more illusive and possibly escapes a clear-cut answer. It has to do with the regulation, or to put it more broadly – with the governance, of the so emerged world of cyber-trade. Who, if anyone, is in charge of it? Does jurisdiction matter and if yes, how does it matter? And then also and more fundamentally, is this cyber-trade, as an extreme and sweeping expression of globalization, something that we should cherish and foster, or rather restrain in order to preserve non-economic and possibly more critical interests, such as national security, freedom of speech, and privacy – both in the online and in the offline spaces?
