Incorporation Of Digital Trade In The International Trade Law Regime: Challenges And Reforms

Incorporation Of Digital Trade In The International Trade Law Regime: Challenges And Reforms In Modernization

V. Sona, LLM-CCL, School of Law, Christ University, Bangalore

ABSTRACT

The process of modernizing the trade laws on an international scale to match the advent of electronic commerce and its advancements has been a very slow and tedious process. Since every country has different interests when it comes to certain cross-border commercial aspects that are complex such as internet usage and digital development, this difference in interest becomes a major area of concern where disputes start to arise between nations. The multilateral agreements and treaties are functioning at their best to incorporate and regulate the growing capacity of e-commerce across international borders. The agreements governed by the World Trade Organisation are at the forefront of creating a regulatory framework for the advancements taking place in the area of digital commerce. The WTO- governed General Agreement on Trade in Services is the major multilateral treaty that is in the present times governing the areas of digital trade. GATS was enacted in the year 1955 for extending the cross-border trading system to the service sector in a way similar to how General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was enacted for implementing cross border trading system in the trade sector. GATS is responsible for regulating the ever- expanding domain of digital trade and at the same time has the responsibility to eliminate any trade barriers pertaining to the area. Also, members involved in separate Preferential Trade Agreements, popularly known as the PTAs have come to incorporate electronic commerce-related provisions into these preferential agreements and this has increased the possibility of the rules of the GATS and PTA colliding against each other if a certain digital trade- related dispute arises. Since PTAs are only undertaken among certain member states of the WTO and not every member, this leads to certain regulations of the PTA being unfavourable towards the rest of the member states. Therefore, this research paper aims to elucidate on the fact that the WTO law should take the centre stage in implementing regulations of digital trade across member states rather than PTAs taking precedence over it. The areas of GATS that need to be severely addressed in order to tackle the problem of regulating the rapidly growing e-commerce sector will also be addressed in this paper.

Keywords: modernization, digitalization, digital economy, international law, electronic commerce.