On Thursday, the people of Syria were cut off from the Internet — almost certainly by the government. Contrary to popular wisdom that the Internet merely detours around censorship, it is possible to remove a whole country from the Internet when cable traffic into that country is concentrated in one or a few key chokepoints. The Internet is only able to circumvent such damage when there are a multitude of pathways — which is the point of using TCP/IP in the first place.
To prevent this sort of outage from happening, the US and other democratic countries can use trade policy to encourage opening of Internet markets — that is, to ensure that there are multiple pathways into each country, so that no easy chokepoint exists. Guaranteeing economic competition for Internet infrastructure helps to ensure that governments do not control that infrastructure.
One proposal that could help is the One Global Internet Act, from U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren. The act would create specific responsibility in the U.S. government for identifying and addressing Internet censorship, and imposing trade and other economic sanctions on countries found to be violators. But the proposal is limited in scope to what the U.S. can do by itself, and does not discuss international regulation of the Internet.
So far, most trade-based regulation of the Internet has happened in bilateral or regional agreements. The problem the industrialized democracies face is that countries which are most likely to be cut-off from the Internet are not likely trading partners — see the map from the previous link. Of the countries in the TransPacific Partnership talks, only Brunei is at risk for cut-off. Vietnam, one of the most censorious countries in the talks, is only at low risk for complete disconnection. While the Internet was important to the beginnings of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, it’s not likely that U.S. will ink a free trade agreement with new government any time soon — which means there is little leverage to open the Internet market. Because of the political costs of negotiating with regimes seen as tyrannic or otherwise objectionable, bilateral and limited trade agreements simply won’t cover many of the countries where Internet freedom might do the most good.
The best response is instead a broadly multilateral approach, encompassing as many countries as possible. This could be pursued through the WTO, which covers 158 countries including many authoritarian regimes. In fact, in 2011 the US government sent a letter to the Chinese government suggesting the latter’s Internet censorship was a violation of WTO rules, and asking for an explanation as to when and by whom decisions to block foreign websites are made. Although China is required to respond under the rules, the US has not received a formal reply. U.S. authorities have yet to decide whether to make a formal complaint to the WTO. On the other hand, WTO members have been resistant to expanding the organizations’ mandate to include information flows. Also in 2011, several nations refused a US and EU proposal that WTO members agree not to block Internet service nor impede the free flow of data.
All of which suggests that existing institutions may not be enough to secure global access to the Internet. Organizations like the WTO or ITU could be enhanced to address this vital issue, or concerned nations might create a separate international institution to guarantee Internet freedom. In any case, trade has an important role to play, and online trade will be affected by any decision to attack censorship.
Project on Trade Agreements and Internet Governance 
