The provisions of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), is a provision of WTO membership to allows access to domestic markets of telecommunications by foreign companies. This is generally cited by Chinese authorities as having little to do with allowing social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to operate unabated. Instead, their contention is that Internet is not a telecommunication service. On the contrary, the US Internet providers enjoy their telecommunication providing status, allowing them to have relatively little in the way of regulating what travels across their communication lines, noted as common carrier protections. Yet, this US principle would not do well in China, as the state would not enjoy common carrier protections. By the taxonomy cited in the text, social media is listed a s internet information service, not offered the same protections as a full-fledged telecommunications service. The flood of information into the nation via foreign content creators is a headache for the Chinese government, who wish to curtail the influence of foreign governments on their citizens, and effort that requires them to be much more strict on their address of these products as compared to the US and EU, respectively. Instead, it may be necessary to consider this as an acceptable Non-trade Concern with future negotiations and iterations of this Article. China must be willing to give other concessions to allow such a remarkably different tolerance for foreign media as they have been thus far.
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