Regulatory Convergence of Data Rules in Latin America (Open Access)

In the past two decades, the rapid development of the Internet allowed the growth of e-commerce, and together with the new digital technologies and the Internet of Things, the flow of data – both commercial and personal has increased to levels unseen before. Traditional trade rules could serve as a starting point to deal with these issues but they clearly are not enough. To provide some context, in 1994 – at the time the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its agreements were established by the Marrakesh Agreement – Mosaic was the most used web browser on the Internet. (Netscape Navigator was created the same year, and Internet Explorer was only released in 1995.)1 Neither Google, nor Amazon or Facebook existed in 1994. The ‘modern’ rules of trade law were not designed having taken into account the characteristics of contemporary digital trade and data flows.