International Trade and Internet Freedom

Abstract

This panel, co-sponsored by Intellectual Property Interest Group, was convened at 9:00 a.m., Thursday, April 10, by its moderator, Declan McCullagh of Wired Magazine, who introduced panelists: Anupam Chander of UC Davis School of Law; Jacqueline Lipton of Case Western Reserve University School of Law; Miriam Sapiro of Summit Strategies International; Wendy Seltzer of Northeastern School of Law; and Michael Traynor of Cooley Godward. * ([dagger]) INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND INTERNET FREEDOM By Anupam Chande ([double dagger]) Proponents of human rights have often found themselves at odds with free traders. The desire to liberalize flow of goods across borders in service of efficient production has at times been insufficiently attentive to rights of workers and health of environment. Cyberspace, however, may offer a context in which desire for free trade and wish to promote political go hand-in-hand. By liberalizing trade in cyberspace, international trade law can bolster circulation of information that authoritarian regimes would repress. In this essay, I want to sketch a hopeful possibility: how Internet under governance of international trade law might bolster political around world. Unexpectedly, General Agreement on Trade in Services (1) might emerge as a human rights document. The new bugaboos of repressive governments are search engines, electronic bulletin boards, blogs and YouTube. These are technologies that allow ordinary individuals to communicate outside mainstream media channels that often prove subservient to governments. (2) This feature, of course, also represents original nature of World Wide Web itself, as it eschewed any central intermediating authority in information circulation. If international trade law can help protect free circulation of information in cyberspace, it can serve cause of political around world. THE INTERSECTION OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND HUMAN RIGHTS Human rights law has typically sought to regulate production of goods in order to avoid exploitation of labor (or relatedly, environment). But with respect to trade in services delivered over Internet, nature of work and presence of an often highly-educated workforce significantly reduce fears of worker exploitation. This does not mean that labor rights are no longer of concern with respect to trade in services, (3) but those concerns are less with sweatshops, below living wage, child labor or perilous working conditions than with right to organize and right to privacy. In trade mediated via cyberspace, human rights law comes to bear in a largely novel fashion: to help further right of individuals to share and receive information. Trade in services shifts locus of human rights attention from production process to its delivery and consumption. Thus, cyberspace offers new and fertile opportunity for human rights law. Human rights law requires that nations not only provide their citizens with free speech rights within their nation, but also right to information of frontiers. This formulation is repeated in both Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well. (4) The Declaration describes right to impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers, and Covenant subsequently reiterated freedom to seek, receive and information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers. While legal status of Universal Declaration is open to question, it nonetheless offers the primary source of global human rights standards. (5) Because of its nature as an international treaty, Covenant carries more binding force than Declaration. (6) The Covenant makes clear that one country's inhabitants have right both to send and to receive information from another country, and thus imposes obligations on both countries to allow information exchange. …