The article is very sensationalist. WTO penalties are meant to be a proportional penalty, not some sort of carte-blanche.

The sensationalist aspect here is the idea that Antigua might set a far below-market price on intellectual property items. Ah, we'll charge $0.000000000000000000000000000001 per song/movie! Functionally unlimited songs and movies for $1! They'll have to negotiate since we now have a legal way for people go get nearly-free, unlimited American content! Except that the world doesn't work that way.

If the United States did something wrong and Antigua was awarded $21M worth of American IP as retaliation, then they should get in the ballpark of $21M. I'm sure no one in the US government is buying the "we can set any price we want and become a legal pirate haven if you don't give us what we want" argument. No one at the WTO would either. It makes a great story - especially since many of us hate the way that content industries in the US act. But the reality is that the WTO's decision is meant to be a proportional penalty to the wrong that has been done, not some vindictive nonsense.

I mean, sometimes countries would rather pay than change their laws - not because they're trying to be mean, but because they just have different values or fears. For example, let's say that Germany thinks that beer has to be made with German hops. There's nothing wrong with American hops. They're perfectly safe. Maybe they taste like crap, but snobbery isn't a valid reason to exclude a product. But maybe the Germans would rather pay. It happens. Further, let's say that Koreans are afraid that fans that don't auto-shutoff after 30 minutes will suck the air out of a room and kill people. Science doesn't back that up, it's not a valid health and safety issue, and if they want to exclude these non-auto-shutoff fans, they need to pay. Where this happens in the real world are on the edges where science is often murky. Is Pesticide A ok? Is additive B safe? Similarly, it happens with things like gambling where the US wants to regulate it and doesn't feel it can exert authority over foreign-companies (even if it sets regulations for them).

None of this is meant to give anyone carte-blanche to force issues. It's meant to keep things equal. Well, if you're going to favour your domestic industries and harm ours by $x, we get to favour our domestic industries and harm your's by the same $x plus maybe some reasonable penalty amount (I don't actually know about penalty amounts) - with "x" being determined by the WTO.

Antigua had been arguing to the WTO that the US harmed it in the billions. The WTO awarded them $21M. It sounds more like, "we're going to try to find a loophole because they mostly disagreed with us" than it does legitimate. Really, it sounds like the type of negotiation posturing that no one buys.

EDIT: I think the important thing to think about here is how you would want things settled in other cases - a consistant standard of practice - and not just in terms of nations. A lot of us here disliked Apple's harsh stand against Android. We don't mind proportional responses, many of us don't mind paying for quality products or components at a fair price. Likewise, we tend to dislike the "they made a tiny infraction! burn everything that is their's!" disproportionate response. Here we have "the US blocked Antiguan gambling sites in a discriminatory manner". The response shouldn't be, "destroy the entire American IP industry until they submit!"

And it's important to note that these standards should (ideally) be applied equally. If we don't wish disproportionate responses against Actor A, we shouldn't wish it against Actor B. The world might be less interesting in such a stable system, but I think we all benefit. We benefit when small wrongs are treated as small wrongs. We suffer when random wrongs carry random penalties.