China Back in WTO Courts - This Time Over the Internet

Filed in archive Internet on March 5, 2008

Just a couple of weeks after China lost its first World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute, the US and the European Union (EU) have brought China back before the WTO, this time over China's practice of blocking direct access to financial news and services available online.

Associate Editor Nate Anderson over at ars technica describes the dispute this way:

The US and the EU have joined forces to haul China before the World Trade Organization (WTO) over the country's refusal to allow financial news services to interact directly with customers. Instead, the new services are required to operate through a unit of Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. That's bad enough, but Xinhua also has its own financial news unit, prompting EU claims that the situation is "not a level playing field."

The dispute is not new; according to Anderson the problem goes all the way back to 1996...






The action brought by the US and the EU means that the parties have a 60 day period of negotiations to go through at the WTO. If those talks don't solve the problem, the US and the EU can request that the WTO form a panel to resolve the issue.