Technological revolutions in the past few decades have reduced the costs of logistics and communication. This in turn has paved the way for a truly global economy. This paper examines the convergence of world economy into a single global economy and the coming of the digital age. These developments also bring with them new challenges. The rise of trade over Internet has only added to the complexities of the trading world. The regulatory framework required to regularize trade over the Net is yet to be developed. Under such circumstances, the author envisions that WTO will have an increasingly critical role to play in the coming years. He urges that WTO should find global consensus on a set of general principles for Internet trade. It will not only have to ensure an open, competitive, well-regulated information economy but will also have to harmonize technical standards. This can be brought about by the WTO members committing to technological neutrality, which means ensuring that current WTO agreements and basic WTO concepts of non-discrimination, national treatment, and most-favored-nation status apply to e-commerce as well as to conventional trade.

Trade agreements have grown in complexity and scope over time, but the landmark achievements of earlier years all dealt with essentially similar problems. They catalogued and reduced tariffs, quotas, and other trade barriers. As a new century opens, however, trade policy is taking on a fundamentally new set of challenges-ensuring an open, competitive, well-regulated information economy. Trade has typically involved goods one can see crossing the border: Iron and steel, semiconductors, cars, or bottles of wine. Post-war administrations thus initially focused on such tangibles by trying to persuade other governments to remove their import tariffs. As tariffs fell, the focus shifted to eliminating import quotas, which distort market behavior and the allocation of resources. As these formal barriers began to diminish, trade negotiations moved into more arcane fields such as harmonizing technical standards-so that a semiconductor chip built in Costa Rica and a hard drive assembled in Southeast Asia, for example, can run programs written in UK by an Indian software specialist for a computer designed in New Jersey.

Digital Divide and the Complexities in the Contemporary Networked World: The Role of WTO l, Technological revolutions, logistics, communication, global economy, complexities of the trading world, WTO, Internet trade, information economy, technological neutrality, most-favored-nation, e-commerce, conventional trade, reduced tariffs, trade barriers, semiconductor chip, Costa Rica.