Digital Trade - the Making of a Category at WTO?

The rapid digitalisation of the global economy has challenged the traditional legal frameworks of the World Trade Organisation (WTO)’s agreements, largely designed for a pre-internet era. This paper examines how digital trade developed from an underdefined concept into a contested category within global trade governance in general and the WTO in particular, with a particular focus on the regulatory tensions surrounding cross-border data transfers. The EU, China, and the US have adopted divergent domestic regulatory approaches to these issues. This fragmentation contributes to a geopolitical struggle over data governance, with developing economies caught between competing regulatory models. The author argues that, while WTO rules are frequently intended to be "technology-neutral", they have not yet been adapted to digital trade, particularly in the context of cross-border data flows. The WTO has yet to develop a coherent, enforceable framework for digital trade governance. Instead, the classification of cross-border data flows has evolved into a legal category, shaped by the shifting power dynamics between WTO members and their competing visions for the future of the global digital economy. The paper also explores methodological questions of conducting non-legal social science research at the WTO and employs a mixed method approach based on interviews with WTO Rules Division lawyers, archival materials, and computational analysis.

Nina Teresa Kiderlin is a post-doc fellow at Médialab, an interdisciplinary laboratory at Sciences Po Paris, working on her SNSF project “Playing in a sandbox: Regulating the Digital Transformation in Finance”.

She holds a PhD in Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research relies on mixed methods focusing on computational sociology to explore how political economy of technology and finance is regulated at the transnational level. She is particularly interested in method development.

Nina has previously been predoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the USA, and she obtained a Master’s in development studies from the Geneva Graduate Institute, and a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology from Durham University.