The Information Revolution: Issues of Transborder Data Flows

Abstract

The international debate on information and communication became intense and acrimonious by the end of the 1970 s. The publication of the Macbride Commission Report in 1980 was the high water-mark in this debate.1 Throughout the 1970 s, the developing countries had been pressing for a new world order on information and communication as part of their struggle for a new international economic order. In the Third World, the public debate in general has been limited to issues of imbalances in the flow of international news dominated by the big four international news agencies (AP, Reuter, AFP and UPI), the efforts of the non-aligned countries to create a newspool, etc. However, the rapid strides in the field of microelectronics and its marriage to the developments in space technology has posed a number of intractable problems before the Third World, besides the issue of newsflow. The most important international fallout of the new developments in technology is the issue of transborder data flows (TDF).2 The international legal, political and economic implications of data flows across national frontiers are increasingly acquiring greater significance.