Abstract:

From the perspective of clarity of commitments and conflict of rules, both general obligations such as transparency and general exceptions and specific commitments of market access and national treatment should be followed for World Trade Organization (WTO) members who censor crossborder Internet servicesIt should take the rules of General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) into account to distinguish different methods of Internet censorshipThere are trends such as by comprehensive citing, on the basis of crossborder service supply as well as technological neutrality, and practical modifying and extending outdated documents, while corresponding between some in W/120 or CPC pro and censored Internet services which individually bear features of several subsectors in W/120, ie, online information and/or data processing (incltransaction processing) (843**), data processing services (843) and audiovisual servicesThe transparency obligation requires appropriate disclosure of censorship and approaches to remedyOverblock or inaccuracy of filtering may result in unfixed quota and restriction on Internet tradeThere is an emerging trade barrier created by censorship and anticensorshipEven constrained by GATS, the Internet sovereignty should be respected and protectedThe jurisdiction of crossborder Internet services, involving censorship, may conflict with GATSThere are risks in selfcensorship

Key words: Internet censorship, crossborder trade, schedule of specific commitments, market access；GATS, WTO