TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday called for new rules to enable the free flow of data, along with efforts to strengthen the democratic framework around international trade as part of reforming the World Trade Organization.
Abe spoke at an evening event at Nikkei’s 25th International Conference on the Future of Asia where he outlined his agenda ahead of the G-20 summit that Japan will host in June.
“We are all in a new era, in which enormous amounts of data travel throughout the world in an instant,” Abe said. He added that data is as important now as petroleum was in the last century.
The Japanese prime minister advocated “an approach that attempts to allow the free flow of data under the rules we can all count upon.”
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