Since the issuance of a joint statement in January 2019, seventy-eight World Trade Organization (WTO) members have confirmed their intention to commence WTO negotiations on trade-related aspects of electronic commerce. There is a growing expectation that a new agreement on trade-related aspects of electronic commerce (TREC Agreement) will be adopted in the not-so-distant future. One key question that has been left out in the process of negotiating the TREC Agreement is how disputes concerning electronic commerce should be settled. This chapter points out that digital trade disputes arising under the proposed TREC Agreement will likely differ from conventional trade disputes arising under the WTO agreements in terms of the diversity of stakeholders and the nature of the balance between trade and non-trade values and that the rules and procedures of the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) may not properly apply to the former. It argues that special or additional dispute settlement rules and procedures should be incorporated into the TREC Agreement to fill those gaps in the existing DSU with regard to the handling of digital trade disputes.

This chapter surveys a number of regulatory interventions through which governments seek to enhance domestic companies’ access to data: mandatory data sharing requirements (as under the EU’s new financial services regulations), data transfer restrictions (as under India’s draft ecommerce policy), and open data initiatives (as under Singapore’s ‘smart nation’ initiative) – all seek to make more data available with the aim of spurring innovation and growth in the AI economy. Such measures are indirectly affected by existing and newly emerging rules of international economic law. International investment law is likely to be mobilized in defense against governments that seek to mandate data sharing from private data holders, while new rules on “digital trade” are meant to ensure transnational data mobility. In sum, international economic law regulates data in favor of data-holders’ ability to retain control over data location and use and constrains states’ ability to confront asymmetric control over data.