Trade and Information Policy

As society is transformed by the usc of new technologies, information policy issues cross traditional boundaries to be found in a wide range of decision-making arenas. The New World Information Order (NWIO) debate lies relatively quiescent in Unesco, but surfaces in international trade negotiations in response to the US push to get trade in services, or international information flows, included under the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a set of international trade agreements designed to deal with goods. The US move of the 1980s to extend the GATT to 'trade' in information has met great resistance from both developed and developing nations. 1 From the beginning, proponents of a New World Information Order have referred to transborder data flows (TBDF) and a range of other types of international information flows in addition to news (Cruise O'Brien, 1980, 1983; Hamelink, 1979; Richstad and Anderson, 1981 ). Developing countries were in this sense ahead of the developed world in understanding that the key to distribution of the world's resources lay within the international information system. The Uruguay Round of GATT talks is one venue in which the geopolitical shift of the late twentieth century away from a Cold War configuration towards a new bloc system is being crafted (Cline, 1983). The fact that these talks deal with international information flows during a period of such global structural change is in itself interesting, for those flows have a cybernetic effect on the nature of that change. Not only do the new telecommunications services make possible instantaneous and massive global information flows which have enabled the development of transnational corporations (TNCs) (Antonelli, 1981, 1984) and other new organizational forms; these flows also feed back information to be used in future rounds of decision-making, thus further shaping the mutating environment. NWIO-type issues may well reach their denouement in trade negotiations. The dominance of the trade arena at a time when the nature of the international information policy regime is just being established means that trade operational definitions, modes of argument and value hierarchies are likely to influence the information policy regime as well. This discussion of the debate over trade in services in the GATT will explore the information policy dimensions of current trade issues of major geopolitical importance. Opening background on the GATT and the trade in services issue, it continues through the problems of economic analysis that underlie trade treatment of information and an exploration of the range of policy options available, and concludes with recommendations regarding strategies for those promoting NWIO-typc concerns.