Internet Censorship Could Be Challenged By WTO

Reuters:

GENEVA (Reuters) - Censorship of the Internet is open to challenge at the World Trade Organization as it can restrict trade in services delivered online, a forthcoming study says. A censorship case at the WTO could raise sovereignty issues, given the clear right of member states to restrict trade on moral grounds -- for example, by blocking access to child pornography websites.

Read the whole story: Reuters

Comments

[Chazmania]

its the slow boil of laws that will eventually strip the common man of his rights and freedoms!
all done in this sneaky stealth way that will go undetected until too late to oppose it!
people think this is all conspiracy nonsense and yet i see continual evidence of the loss of these rights under disguise of "protecting" us! if this trend continues i have a premonition that at some future time there will be martial law imposed and curfews and police abuse and arrests in massive numbers when things get so bad people start to revolt!

[EndTheEcho]

So much irony. Republicans and conservatives are so worried about losing sovereignty to the scary UN, but they also ignore (beholden to corporations) the handing over of sovereignty to trade deals as this sentence says:

A censorship case at the WTO could raise sovereignty issues, given the clear right of member states to restrict trade on moral grounds -- for example, by blocking access to child pornography websites.

From Business Week (not the Nation)

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_10/b3923130.htm

The assault on sovereignty is rooted in a series of trade agreements stretching back to the mid-1990s. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and the pact creating the WTO in 1995 both established three-judge panels that can authorize punitive tariffs or fines against violators. These judges put teeth behind vaguely worded commitments -- buried in hundreds of pages of arcane detail -- that nations will use the "least trade-restrictive" regulations and laws "no more burdensome than necessary" to accomplish their social, economic, and environmental goals. The unintended result: "These agreements are not just about trade anymore," says Lori Wallach, a trade-law expert at consumer watchdog Public Citizen. "They're about every aspect of government."