What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Digital Protectionism?

Susan Aaronson

Working Papers from The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy

Abstract: For almost a decade, executives, scholars, and trade diplomats have argued that filtering, censorship, localization requirements, and domestic regulations are distorting the cross-border information flows that underpin the internet. Herein I use process tracing to examine the state and implications of digital protectionism. I make five points: First, I note that digital protectionism differs from protectionism of goods and other services. Information is intangible, highly tradable, and some information is a public good. Secondly, I argue that it will not be easy to set international rules to limit digital protectionism without shared norms and definitions. Thirdly, the US, EU, and Canada have labeled other countries policies’ protectionist, yet their arguments and actions sometimes appear hypocritical. Fourth, I discuss the challenge of Chinese failure to follow key internet governance norms. China allegedly has used a wide range of cyber strategies, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks (bombarding a web site with service requests) to censor information flows and impede online market access beyond its borders. WTO members have yet to discuss this issue and the threat it poses to trade norms and rules. Finally, I note that digital protectionism may be self-defeating. I then draw conclusions and make policy recommendations.

Keywords: data; internet; e-commerce; digital trade; data flows; WTO; protectionism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F1 F5 F6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict, nep-int and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.gwu.edu/~iiep/assets/docs/papers/2018WP/AaronsonIIEP2018-13.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Digital Protectionism? (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gwi:wpaper:2018-13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kyle Renner ().