China’s sudden move to join the US, Japan, Australia, EU and Singapore for developing trade rules for ecommerce has put pressure on India to join the talks, which have been opposed by more than half of the World Trade Organistion (WTO) members.
China, which joined the league of 75 other countries on Friday had, till recently, opposed binding provisions for cross-border data flow, preventing data localisation and protection of source code, like India.
“This is an abrupt move by China. It will put us under pressure to join the plurilateral,” said an official. At the Buenos Aires WTO ministerial, many countries had rejected the agenda on digital trade.
“We confirm our intention to commence WTO negotiations on trade-related aspects of electronic commerce,” the group said on Friday at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Experts fear this move will impact talks of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership trade pact where rules on e-commerce could seep in.
“Till now, China’s stance was somewhat closer to ours. It has made a sudden switch overnight and is likely to exempt itself from binding rules for cross-border data flows,” said an expert.
India has told the WTO that developing countries need to maintain policy space in certain aspects of e-commerce such as ownership and use and flow of data in “sunrise sectors like cloud computing and data storage” and in the facets related to hosting of servers, big data analytics and M2M (machine-to-machine) communication.
Terming binding rules on e-commerce as “premature digital liberalisation”, civil society groups said that economic sovereignty and future development prospects of developing and poor countries are threatened as a few global players dominate the digital trade.
“These proposed negotiations on e-commerce which, if concluded, would severely constrain the policy space of countries to develop their economies in the future, and would accelerate the global disadvantaging of workers and small enterprises in all countries vis-à-vis large corporations that characterizes the current global economy,” said a group of 18 civil society organisations from places like India, Finland, Norway, the UK and Africa.
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