New Deadline in Antigua and Barbuda-U.S. WTO CaseCountries Hope to Have it Finished Oct. 1 |
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A new deadline has been established by the World Trade Organization for Antigua and Barbuda and the United States to reach a conclusion in the five-year-long dispute between the two WTO members centered on online gambling.
The new deadline — after several of which have already come and gone — is Oct. 1.
WTO panels agreed that Antigua and Barbuda is entitled to compensation because the United States works to stop its citizens from patronizing online gambling sites located in the island nation. The WTO considers online gambling a product and the United States agreed to allow free trade of this product when it signed the GATS agreement more than 10 years ago.
U.S. trade officials claimed that the U.S. government didn’t know that online gambling was contained in the GATS agreement, and therefore its anti-online gambling stance didn’t violate WTO rules.
After exhausting its appeals, the U.S. Trade Office Representatives revised the portions of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) so that it falls in line with current U.S. policy concerning online gaming, which opened up the U.S. to WTO lawsuits from member countries who could prove that the revision will cause them to lose money.
The U.S. has already settled with several WTO members (U.K., Japan, and Canada among them) who took advantage of the WTO rule that allows this, costing the U.S. an unknown amount of dollars through sanctions in the postal and courier, research and development, and storage and warehouse sectors.
As for Antigua and Barbuda, the WTO ruled that the U.S. owes it $21 million annually, far below the $3.4 billion the island nation claimed is being lost because its companies can’t serve customers in the U.S.
How the U.S. will pay the $21 million is being worked out. Because Antigua and Barbuda is such a small nation with no real export, it’s naturally on uneven ground when dealing with the U.S. or any of the larger WTO members. Reports from Antigua and Barbuda’s attorneys say the dollars will probably be collected by allowing Antigua and Barbuda to reproduce copyrighted material that originated in the U.S.
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