‘Private’ Cybersecurity Standards? Cyberspace Governance, Multistake Holderism, and the (Ir)relevance of the TBT Regime

The business sector has actively taken on the standardization initiative. More and more jurisdictions have been settling on a bottom-up approach to cybersecurity policymaking, which aims to minimize mandatory governmental regulation and to favor a voluntary private-sector standard to enhance cybersecurity. To analyze the privatization of governance in a systematic way, this article placed the “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches in such a context that allows us to identify the features of different types of cybersecurity standard-setting and to recognize the challenges to international economic order. How can the WTO become a forum for trade disputes concerning “private, voluntary” cybersecurity standards created through a multistakeholder process? Cyberspace governance is a complex problem. The fact that certain informal norms have the potential to become de facto international standards creates a renewed sense of urgency for the WTO to take action in order to avoid the fate of being eclipsed into irrelevance in the domain of cyberspace governance