<<Last year, a team of writers from the European Centre for International Political Economy suggested that China's draconian Internet filters could be defanged by hauling the country before the World Trade Organization, claiming that censorship is a trade issue.

Yesterday, the European Commission blessed this approach as Commissioner Neelie Kroes made a trip to China. "It is one of those issues that needs to be tackled within the WTO," she said of censorship, according to Reuters. "I am pushing wherever I can just to get European enterprises a level playing field in China and the other way around. It should be reciprocal."

According to the earlier paper on the subject, the WTO would be unlikely to take on the basic system of filtering. But, said the authors, "There is a good chance that a [WTO] panel might rule that permanent blocks on search engines, photo-sharing applications and other services are inconsistent with the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) provisions, even given morals and security exceptions.">>

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/chinas-great-firewall-a-trade-barrier-says-eu-commissioner.ars

Cf. http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2010-03-25-n41.html:

<<Alan Davidson, director of public policy for Google, “told a joint Congressional panel that the United States and other democracies should draft trade agreements that incorporate pledges to keep Web sites uncensored. He said censorship had become more than a human rights issue and was hurting profit for foreign companies.”>>