Trade and Technology

Information technology is rapidly expanding the scope of trade disputes into traditionally distinct policy areas such as taxation, encryption, and privacy. As people, information, goods, and capital cross international borders at an unprecedented pace, governments are increasingly being forced to compete with each other to attract commerce and investment. For the most part, that competition is liberating private markets and rapidly increasing living standards around the world.

But just as technology can emancipate, it can also subjugate. The borderless world of the Internet might lead not to competition, but to collusion among nations--the ability of the individual to find a safe haven from tyranny falling victim to a "global value consensus." Such pressures to use technology to suppress liberty are already building. The European Union is calling for the United States to enforce collection of its value-added taxes, to ban politically unpopular books that are available online, and to assume greater government control over the exchange of personal information. Law enforcement officials in this country are calling for the unrestricted use of sophisticated surveillance technologies and the international regulation of privacy-enhancing technologies. CTPS scholars recognize that it is essential to get the fundamentals right. If free-market principles are to govern the evolution of a global information economy, they must be established now, while the online economy is in its infancy.