The WTO and Digitalization: Where Do We Go from Here?
Dear Reader,
As the 2024 World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference (MC13) kicked off this week, there is considerable suspense about what is going to unfold. As we had reported, the US’ sudden about-turn on its digital trade position last year last year has ruptured the dominant framing of the battles taking place around digital issues at the WTO. Now, with realignments on the horizon, we hope to provide some contextualizing and critical analysis this month and the next.
First, however, let's take a quick look at the month gone by…
It’s been a dramatic few weeks in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). Widespread outrage at scandals like the Taylor Swift deepfakes and AI-generated Biden robocalls managed to create sufficient pressure to force a response. Big Tech companies across the board have agreed to enforce novel content provenance standards; essentially, digital watermarks that can identify AI-generated content. Yet, having these Silicon Valley giants within the steering community for these standards bodes ominously for public accountability. Fortunately, emerging legislative interventions like the EU’s AI Act and Digital Services Act also provide binding norms around this issue, with other parts of the world signaling their resolve to implement similar frameworks.
February 2024 also saw two very significant new generative AI (Gen AI) launches: Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s Sora. The former is a family of large-language models that will now be integrated across all of Google’s products, from Android to Google Docs; the latter is a startling new paradigm of text-to-video generation that has managed to produce strikingly realistic content in some cases. Such developments only underline the pace at which the space is evolving, and the exponential rate at which regulatory concerns are multiplying around these technologies.
Meanwhile, cybercrime loomed large in public discourse during February. The 2024 Munich Security report saw G7 countries rank cybercrime as the second biggest global threat facing them today. This came hot on the heels of cybersecurity researchers uncovering what is perhaps the biggest database leak in history, jeopardizing nearly 26 billion data records. Yet, despite this professed urgency, the concluding session of the Ad Hoc Committee on Cybercrime ended without consensus. Critics have pointed out that this may well be a blessing, given that much of the movement around the UN cybercrime treaty was turning increasingly anti-democratic. Digital rights organizations, for instance, drew attention to insidious attempts to broaden the definition of cybercrime to allow states and law enforcement agencies new draconian powers. Similarly, developing countries have argued that proposed provisions place new burdens of implementation on them, without including sufficient technology transfers or financial resources to fully adopt such measures.
February also saw the announcement of a number of digital industrialization initiatives. Both the EU and Nigeria, for instance, unveiled large-scale infrastructure packages to boost digital connectivity within their respective terrains. Singapore announced a large USD 740 million investment to build domestic capabilities in AI and become a regional tech hub going forward. Even Germany, historically averse to such forms of state intervention, has announced a strategy to move towards greater technological sovereignty in the digital sphere. At the same time, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) released a first draft of its protocol on digital trade, which aims to establish common norms and standards between countries within Africa. The idea is to create a ‘single digital market’ within Africa with respect to data flows and digital services.
All of these varied developments reflect the growing ‘scramble for infrastructure’ that seems to characterize digital policy today, with countries either seeking to create the technological and regulatory conditions to tap into the digital paradigm equitably, or alternatively, seeking to insert themselves at key points within the global infrastructural complex in order to gain gatekeeper status around emerging digital value chains.
Shifting back to our current issue, this month on DataSyn we bring a series of short pieces designed to contextualize and reflect on the digital trade landscape as this year’s WTO Ministerial Conference takes place. Our first piece takes a critical look at the US’ dramatic reversal of its stance on key issues, probing into the motivations and consequences of this development. Our second piece ties the historical conflicts around digital trade to the cutting-edge issues around AI regulation, shedding light on the politics of this important conjuncture. Finally, our third piece takes a step back, providing a helpful overview of the neo-colonial tendencies that have plagued the digital trade arena in recent years.
The DataSyn Team
THE NEW DIVERGENCE
Uncle Sam and Big Tech: The End of a Love Affair?
Rishab Bailey and Melanie Foley
The most significant recent development on the digital trade front has been the US’ withdrawal from the World Trade Organization’s plurilateral Joint Statement Initiative on E-Commerce (JSI). In fact, this move was especially stunning given that it was explicitly framed as an attempt to bolster the US government’s capacity to regulate its tech giants. What exactly happened, and what does it portend for the American state-Big Tech nexus? Rishab Bailey and Melanie Foley unpack these threads in their analysis.
Read on.
THE POLICY TABLE
What Does Trade Have to Do with AI Regulation?
Jai Vipra
As AI increasingly takes center stage in discussions about regulating the digital sphere, it is important to see how the contested terrain of digital trade negotiations may impact our legal oversight of AI. Jai Vipra delves into this question by surveying relevant trade issues that are being currently debated at the WTO.
Read on.
THE BIG EXCESS
A New Colonialist Wave through Digital Trade Agreements
Sofia Scasserra
Why is the WTO Ministerial a particularly charged event for civil society and digital rights organizations from the developing world? Sofia Scassera provides a timely contextualization of the neo-colonial politics that has characterized digital trade agendas in the recent past. She sheds particular light on the WTO as a site for this struggle to play out, alongside how it has also been taken up in the context of fiercely propagated Free Trade Agreements.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
Ahead of the Thirteenth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization, the Gender and Trade Coalition, a global alliance of international and regional feminist networks and progressive allies across civil society, academia, and trade unions, released an open letter to the Member States and Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to address gender issues at the WTO in an alternative manner that advances feminist trade analysis and advocates for equitable trade policy. Read this important intervention here.
With the US withdrawal, digital trade negotiations at the WTO are all set to be potentially reconfigured. However, in order to gauge how things evolve from here, it is crucial to understand the fierce battles around digital trade that have raged at this site in recent years. For a comprehensive primer on exactly that context, tune in to this lively panel discussion with Deborah James, Kate Lappin, Caroline Khamati Mugalla, and Rashmi Banga.
As theorizations of the platform economy become more refined, newer studies are able to bring a welcome dose of nuance and pay closer attention to how non-standard contexts shape the trajectories that platformization can take. In this vein, check out this recent piece by Chris Foster, where he draws on a ‘varieties of capitalism’ framework to study the intricacies of digital marketplaces in Thailand.
Countries across the Global South are increasingly clued into the stakes of the digital paradigm for the future of their economies, and are experimenting with different measures to secure their own digital sovereignty. Read this piece where Sebastián Lehuedé compares a variety of digital sovereignty frameworks, and fleshes out the unique contribution of Latin America’s emphatically decolonial approach.
With the release of OpenAI’s Sora model this past month, a whole array of key regulatory issues has become more urgent than ever: the proliferation of misinformation, the capacity to detect deepfakes, and the impact on existing labor practices. For a nuanced discussion on the latter, check out this Data & Society roundtable on ‘Generative AI’s Labour Impacts’.
Post-script
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