The ultimate privatisation?
> companies that censor their citizens' access to the internet
And you thought your employer only owned your soul?
The World Trade Organisation has raised the delicious possibility of using its regulations to smite companies that censor their citizens' access to the internet - before admitting that this approach is unlikely to get very far. A paper produced by the European Centre for International Political Economy observes that the …
This report is ridiculous. The WTO allows countries to ban things they don't like, as long as they apply the same rule to imports as to home-grown products and services. This is why e.g. the USA can ban gambling (but it can't ban foreign internet gambling while allowing home-grown gambling) and Arab countries can ban alcohol. Therefore, the WTO only becomes an issue of China is banning people from reading foreign sites about Tiananmen square but is happy to allow Chinese websites to report the atrocities, and I really don't see that happening. Governments are far more likely to censor domestic content than foreign imports, and there's nothing the WTO can do about that.