Columbia University President Lee Bollinger wants the WTO to help promote free speech:
On Google’s recent development with China, Bollinger said, “I have the sense that the lines have been drawn in the sand and Google is withdrawing to Hong Kong and maybe beyond. … What's going to happen is exactly what is up for grabs. This is where we really need to get serious about this.”
He said the importance of making the First Amendment a global agenda is “a better way to live than one that a world that really constricts information flows. I don’t know how it will come out, that’s precisely why I think we need to engage with this in a major way, much more so than we are doing at the current time.”
Bollinger encouraged leveraging the economic/trade mechanism to promote global freedom of ideas and information. “We’ve been very good at building over the last couple of decades a global system of trade in goods and services. Now we need to develop a better global free trade in ideas and information. We can use the mechanism of trade, the WTO in particular, as a lever to try to get great freedom in the market place of ideas and info as well as the marketplace of goods and services.”
