Simon Lester

In India: India's telecoms regulator has blocked Facebook's Free Basics internet service app as part of a ruling in favour of net neutrality. The scheme offered free access to a limited number of websites. However, it was opposed by supporters of net neutrality who argued that

In my daily trade news reading, I was surprised to come across this sentence: [New Zealand] has not lost a dispute at the WTO in 20 years. Can that really be true, I thought?  Luckily, there's a web site that tracks these things, so I looked up the

From TradeLab: POSITION VACANT Project Coordinator, TradeLab – International Economic Law (Trade and/or Investment) Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, together with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, the University of Arizona, Qatar University School of Law and a number of international partners, is

From a post at the EFILA blog: An investor in a Host State court is automatically an alien, advancing a claim in a foreign court automatically places the investor at a disadvantage of itself. This seems like an assertion that could be studied empirically. How are aliens treated in domestic

There's an interesting NAFTA Chapter 11 claim going on related to wind energy. As Lise Johnson explains in Investment Arbitration Reporter: The NAFTA Chapter 11 case relates to an offshore wind energy project being developed as part of Ontario’s Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) Program. Windstream claims to have been

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade and investment agreement was formally signed by 12 ministers in Auckland on February 4. Independent Senator Nick Xenophon spoke in the Senate about the agreement. "It has been put to me that, if a government introduced poker machine legislation to

Some cold water from Senator Orrin Hatch: Long story short, Mr. President, no one should be under any illusions that, because the TPP is being signed today, an up or down vote on the agreement is imminent or that our oversight responsibilities are at an end. If history has taught

This is from a Peterson Institute working paper, by Peter Petri and Michael Plummer, that estimates the economic effects of the TPP: The bottom half of the table shows NTBs, represented as tariffs that would have had the same protective effect (tariff equivalents). NTBs include quotas in agriculture and energy,

A few weeks ago, I noted that the EU - Viet Nam FTA would include the EU's proposed new Investment Court System (ICS). The text of that FTA has just been released, so now everyone can see what the big deal is. The ICS part is in Chapter

On Friday, ICTSD and WTI Adivisors hosted an excellent discussion of the US - Tuna II WTO Appellate Body report, with Lorand Bartels, Joel Trachtman, Iain Sandford, David Agnew, and Matthew Owens as speakers. You can view the recording here. Via twitter, I asked the following questions: "The AB