Some proposed revisions to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) violate...
Some proposed revisions to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) violate the commitments the proposing nations made under the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its General Agreement on Trade in Services, the European Centre for International Political Economy said Wednesday in…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
a report. The report, commissioned by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said WTO member-states are bound to commitments that bar them from imposing restrictions on common Internet services -- commitments they would break if some proposed revisions to the ITRs pass at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), which begins Monday in Dubai. WTO member-states must also abide by the WTO’s e-commerce moratorium, which bars them from charging access fees for data, whether or not such a charge is discriminatory, the report said. Access charges have been a source of controversy in the lead-up to WCIT. The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations declined to sponsor a proposal from the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) that would institute a “sender party pays” rule, but nations in Africa and the Middle East have since submitted their own ETNO-like proposals for consideration at WCIT (CD Nov 5 p6). Delegates to WCIT will need to consider the commitments their nations made to the WTO, said Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, co-author of the report, in a news release (http://xrl.us/bn3wbr). “Whatever the outcome will be during WCIT, it will not provide a carte blanche to disrupt data flows” or discriminate against foreign entities in violation of the WTO rules, Lee-Makiyama said. “Such market interference will lead to costly trade retaliations.” Any WTO member state that violates these commitments could be subject to WTO trade retaliation. The e-commerce moratorium is also politically linked to pledges not to pursue certain intellectual property violation cases in developing nations, the report said (http://xrl.us/bn3wcb).