A profoundly important development in digital trade took place this week – and it was not a very good one. But it attracted much less notice and protest than it should have. We are referring to the decision by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. to erect a...
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is going to hold a ministerial conference from 10 to 13 December 2017. This conference could be of high importance for e-commerce and Internet governance. The WTO ministerial conference happens every 4 years. Delegates have discussed the e-commerce work program at every ministerial conference since...
On October 6th a letter was circulated to the negotiators preparing for the World Trade Organization’s 11th Ministerial meeting (MC11), which will be held December 10-13, 2017 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The letter purports to speak for all of “global civil society,” and singles out for attack the prospect of...
The United States Trade Representative recently issued a document describing its NAFTA negotiations priorities. On 28 July 2017, The R Street Institute arranged a panel on NAFTA and Digital Trade. IGP’s Farzaneh Badiei was invited to take part in the panel. The panel discussed the policy and political issues surrounding...
Guest Blog By Holly Dragoo In November 2016, the National People’s Congress (NPC) of China passed the Chinese Cybersecurity Law (CSL), governing a broad range of issues from securing personal information to data leaks and governance, to hacking. International technology firms are especially concerned, however, as the law uses ambiguous...
Updated: Videos of workshops added below. The 2016 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is scheduled to take place at the PALCCO Centre from 6-9 December 2016 in Guadalajara, Mexico. Several partners in the IGP, which was recently reconstituted at Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy, will be there - as observers,...
An important proposal for inter-regional market transfers of IP addresses has been put before RIPE-NCC, the Internet protocol address registry for the European region. The proposal notes that “there is a significant over-supply of IPv4 in North America versus the rest of the world,” and that “in a global economy,...
Here is more evidence of how the emergence of a private market for IPv4 addresses is creating concern at ARIN and driving policy change. Note that in my interview with private address broker Addrex, published here a week ago, its President Charles Lee noted that large ISPs in the Asia Pacific region were showing strong buyer interest in legacy address blocks currently sitting idle in North America. This poses a problem for the current RIR system. The RIRs are organized around exclusive territorial regions and their policies basically prohibit inter-regional sales of address blocks. A private broker dealing in legacy address space, however, is not subject to those constraints. Once again, an emergent market subtly disrupts the establish institutional regime.
ARIN is, evidently, scrambling to catch up. A new proposal was submitted to ARIN's policy development process just yesterday. Entitled “ARIN-prop-156 Update 8.3 to allow inter-RIR transfers” it would allow inter-regional market transfers.
The European think-tank ECIPE has released a provocative new report, Digital Authoritarianism: Human Rights, Geopolitics and Commerce, that explores the ties between Internet censorship and human rights, commerce, national security and foreign relations. Looking at China in particular, it suggests generally that countries should be taken to the WTO for...
Citing instances of espionage and surveillance of its customers, Google announced in coordinated fashion yesterday that they are no longer willing to continue censoring results on Google.cn, and threatened that it might withdraw operations from China entirely. Some are wondering if Google would actually walk away from the China market. Frankly, China routinely leverages the size of its market and counts on the fact that no business dares to give up a market of that size. But when businesses are willing to play rough and threaten exit they are more likely to get positive results than when they kow-tow. That being said, you don't make the move Google did without a plan. And that makes me think we might be witnessing the precursor to a major development in the application of trade principles to Internet governance.
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”
