With China evidently in its sights, Google has released a policy paper contending that countries that limit Internet users’ access to information providers outside their borders violate their WTO commitments.
The company did not single out China in the position paper. But Google has had a running battle with Beijing over censorship, and many of the examples cited in the paper came from the firm’s experiences with China. The paper was published online on Monday, but went unnoticed until bloggers started writing about it on Tuesday.
Bob Boorstin, Google’s public policy director, made the free-trade link forcefully in a posting on Google’s public policy blog.
“The premise is simple,” he wrote in a statement posted on the blog with a link to the paper. “In addition to infringing human rights, governments that block the free flow of information on the Internet are also blocking trade and economic growth.”
Boorstin also called for Western officials to challenge trade barriers to information: “In the paper ..., we urge policy makers in the United States, European Union and elsewhere to take steps to break down barriers to free trade and Internet commerce.”
The Google policy paper said that more than 40 governments now to some extent restrict freedom of information on the Internet — which it said was more than a tenfold increase in the past decade of governments with such restrictions. Others include India, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Vietnam.
In an interview on Tuesday, Boorstin said he hoped the paper might resonate with trade officials currently negotiating the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership — a Pacific rim free-trade pact that is being pushed by the US.
Until January, Google was censoring search results delivered to computers in China. In March, it curtailed its operations in China and began directing Internet users there to its site in Hong Kong.
Google’s paper emphasized that when the WTO was created in 1995, free-trade rules were broadened in many ways to cover services like Internet searches. Chinese officials have said that their commercial policies comply with WTO rules.
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