With new trade deal, Big Tech wants to be above the law

178 88 3 years ago

josteink• 3 years ago

With IPEF, even Congress has been shut out of negotiations, which limits accountability and transparency. Both Democratic(new window) and Republican(new window) lawmakers have spoken out to oppose the US Trade Representative’s usurpation of congressional authority to craft domestic tech policy.

So trade-agreements which overrides national laws are being developed without any representatives from the actual government which is asked to enact this into law?

Come on. At least pretend you’re not trying to sidestep democracy and democratic processes entirely.

This is embarrassingly transparent, and I can’t see actions like this do anything but further the conspiracy(?)-theories surrounding World Economic Forum.

amelius2• 3 years ago

Can't we have a constitutional law that always invalidates any law that is implemented in a way that goes against democratic principles?

pjc50• 3 years ago

There's a very real problem that "make binding agreement with another country" and "total independence of the legislature" are incompatible. The most obvious one is external debt - see what happened when Argentina tried to legislate theirs away.

If your country agrees not to make a law that has a certain effect, and then makes that law, it's breached international law. And for countries other than America that has negative consequences imposed by America.

gostsamo3• 3 years ago

If you define the democratic principals in the constitution, and define them as fundamental, then the constitutional court would consider any lesser law as unconstitutional.

bregma• 3 years ago

Here's how the US Constitution works: the Executive is solely responsible for negotiating and signing international treaties and trade deals with no input from Congress or the Judiciary. Once signed, a treaty or trade deal is a piece of paper with no value.

Once a trade deal has been made by the Executive, Congress needs to introduce and pass legislation to implement the deal. They may choose to implement it as is, or more likely make all kinds of changes and implement something completely different. Once Congress has passed an implementation bill into law, the Executive develops all the rules and regulations associated with it and actually implements it, including enforcement bodies and committees to determine if the treaty or trade deal has been violated.

Then it's up to the Judicial branch to determine if the laws passed by Congress are valid or not, in terms of other laws and precedents, when asked.

So don't go off on some internet-based conspiracy rant that regular constitutional operations are trying to subvert Your Freedoms. Read opinion pieces on the internet in the context of knowledge and actual fact and in the spirit of click draws and eyeball sales.

ororroro2• 3 years ago

Executive agreements (agreements made in the absence of the Senate) are not mentioned in the Constitution, but they are considered binding U.S. international agreements under Supreme Court case law and as a matter of historical practice.

edgyquant2• 3 years ago

the Executive is solely responsible for negotiating and signing international treaties and trade deals with no input from Congress or the Judiciary

Wait what? This is completely wrong. The Legislative branch ratifies treaties according to the constitution.

devjab• 3 years ago

I'll admit that I don't know a whole lot about global supply chains for tech mastodons, but seeing how this isn't going to be an European thing, wouldn't this lead to companies like Apple being forced to create a trans pacific and a European iPhone? If so, then I wonder how the benefit realization of this whole thing pans out compared to simply complying with legislation demanding more openness. Even if that made sense, or some of these tech giants simply decided to cut their losses and say good buy to the Euro sector, how long do they really expect these trade deals to last when they try to side step the US democracy as hinted by:

With IPEF, even Congress has been shut out of negotiations, which limits accountability and transparency.

Maybe I'm alone in thinking this, but I doubt that it'll work out well in the long term. The EU has been very strong on enforcing consumer rights, but a lot of the benefits we get here in the EU seem to catch on in the US eventually, and then what will these deals really accomplish? Are those 5-15 years of monopoly really worth all the fighting? And perhaps more importantly, is it really worth more than being a "first mover" on building a more consumer friendly platform?

TheLoafOfBread• 3 years ago

Even if that made sense, or some of these tech giants simply decided to cut their losses and say good buy to the Euro sector

I think it would be short-sighted decision. Currently European tech scene isn't great, because it is hard to compete with US companies awash of VC money or who are highly profitable and entrenched in the EU market. But if those giants would voluntarily clear positions, competition would have arise and could threaten the giants in the long run - i.e. by offering privacy thanks to coming from EU, where GDPR non-compliance is very expensive.

This is similar situation to why USA has such huge military presence in Europe in general. Sure it is expensive and Europeans are sometimes ungrateful, but if they would have left, then in the long run EU would likely got its own unified army and become serious geopolitical competitor on level of China, even if ideologically aligned with USA.

surgical_fire9• 3 years ago

Europeans are sometimes ungrateful

Why exactly Europeans should be grateful?

US presence in Europe is something done to serve US purposes. Let's not pretend it sets up military bases abroad out of the goodness of their hearts, to protect the world or any such bullshit.

londons_explore• 3 years ago

This blog post doesn't seem to really explain the issue - at least not clearly enough for me to understand it.

What exactly does this trade deal say? What specific consequences would that have? (with examples from past or potential local laws)

WastingMyTime893• 3 years ago

The article is not very good but multinationals have been significantly abusing free-trade agreements for decades.

These agreements are negotiated in secret with very little public oversight and parliaments usually can only say yes or no to the whole thing. If it’s the EU sometimes national parliaments have no say.

Companies lobby to put clauses mandating arbitration or classifying some laws as distortion of competition. Here the article focus on laws impacting big tech but the same could be said for basically any sector.

hash8723• 3 years ago

If trade deals were passed like legislation in a parliament or Congress, with time in committee and lots of room for individual legislators to add their input, there would be so much more corporate abuse it's not even funny. This would give a chance for every favored sector, major employer in a powerful legislator's district, company that the government favors at the moment etc. to add in clauses favoring them. Doing an up-or-down or vote actually greatly reduces pork.

If it’s the EU sometimes national parliaments have no say

Yes, that is what the European Union is, by deliberate design. The individual countries voluntarily agreed to give up that power- if they didn't, they'd have been pushed around by China and the Trump administration. The EU is strength in size as a negotiating bloc, as a top 3 global economy. (Also, famously, countries can just leave the EU if they don't feel like it's a good deal)

birdyrooster2• 3 years ago

Sounds like a lot of deals between Democrats and Republicans. Two deeply undemocratic parties who rig their own primary elections make deals in private to get votes for their shared corporate agenda. Seems legit.

tzs• 3 years ago

These agreements are negotiated in secret with very little public oversight and parliaments usually can only say yes or no to the whole thing.

The are negotiated in secret because if they were negotiated in the open it would pretty much impossible to ever actually get anything the could be ratified.

Over the course of negotiation generally each party needs to make concessions in some areas in order to get what they want in other areas. From draft to draft what they concede and what they get will change.

If that was all in the open by the time the proposed final treaty is up for ratification every group that thinks that the final draft is less beneficial or more harmful to them than an earlier draft would be opposed. Even if the final is better for them than not having a treaty it often won't matter...they had more in a draft, and will want more negotiations to get that back.

cool_dude85• 3 years ago

Are you asking why the article isn't offering specifics of this secretive trade deal that's currently being negotiated behind closed doors?

nl2• 3 years ago

I agree it doesn't do a great job explaining the issue.

You can find a better summary in [1]:

The TPP and USMCA have a broadly worded “nondiscrimination” requirement that could be interpreted as restricting member countries from enacting policy that, while neutral on its face, effectively has a greater impact on firms from a particular country.
This risk is not hypothetical. We’ve already seen Apple and Google wield this argument in the context of South Korea’s 2021 law targeting anticompetitive app store policies, on the grounds that it has a discriminatory effect because of its disparate impact on U.S. firms.

So basically large tech firms are trying to use trade agreements that are supposed to equalize market access to instead argue that laws aimed at their behavior are illegal under the terms of the trade agreement.

Also:

Expansive and absolute-secrecy guarantees for source code and algorithms are another key feature of the industry-backed USMCA/TPP approach. These provisions are justified as preventing the forced transfer of software trade secrets as a condition for market access (a concern animated primarily by Chinese actions in the past)
several organizations have pointed out that the USMCA definition of “algorithm” is broad enough to restrict the sharing of even mere descriptions of algorithms with regulators, a key part of algorithmic transparency proposals..

[1] https://ainowinstitute.org/publication/international-digital...

charlieyu1• 3 years ago

Not sure how this would even work. To my knowledge trade deals can only be disputed by signing countries, not corporations. I don't think a bubble gum company in US can sue Singapore for the bubble gum ban, for example.

MichaelZuo• 3 years ago

Do you know if this nebulous trade deal referred to in the Proton article is the CPTPP or the Indo-Pacific Framework?

jmclnx• 3 years ago

The truth is, all companies want to be above the law.

In reality once a company reaches a certain size and can afford a large team of good overpaid lawyers and lobbyists, they become above the law (at least in the US).

All these companies want to do is discard their lobbyists and lawyers.

ta1243• 3 years ago

Not even the lobbyists. Once you become "too big to fail" you're quids in.

nonethewiser• 3 years ago

Dominant tech companies use their economic power to win favorable concessions in trade deals. Only appointed trade advisers(new window) can participate in the confidential negotiations, and these advisers disproportionately represent Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and their trade associations.

They also disproportionately represent the US economy.

amadeuspagel2• 3 years ago

I see many complaints that american tech companies are banned in china, while TikTok is allowed in the US. Maybe this is the kind of thing that this trade deal is supposed to address? Seems reasonable, if so. Would love to learn more about this, but this an extremely one-sided article.

mark_l_watson3• 3 years ago

The blog does a great job describing the overall arc of corporate capture of government regulatory agencies and trade policies. As other people here have said, it could have included more concrete examples - doubling the size of the article with more examples would be good. Still, well written.

I have been totally captured by the Apple ecosystem and I am not always happy about that. I am more mellow about Google because I pay for the Google services that I use and love (YouTube with no advertisements and YouTube Music, GCP, Colab). I feel that my relationship with Google is transactional under terms I like well enough. I don’t use Google Search.

Off topic, but this blog is on ProtonMail’s domain and I personally think ProtonMail+Calendar+Cloud Storage should get some sort of “most improved product” award. I have been a paying Proton customer for a very long time, but for the last 6 years I have mostly used either Gmail, Apple mail, or FastMail as my primary email with my personal domain. In the last 3 or 4 months I have gone back to using ProtonMail as my primary email provider, and for me it is now 100% “good enough.” Enough small improvements to satisfy me.

I would like to talk more about digital independence and freedom, so I am going to go try to find a Reddit community for this.

mark_l_watson3• 3 years ago

Search Reddit manually didn’t much help, but Bing+ChatGPT suggested: /r/privacy, /r/degoogle, /r/deapple/, /r/free software, /r/privacytoolsIO, /r/LinageOS

hansvm• 3 years ago

Even when paying, Google scares me a bit for anything important. Just last night I switched ISPs, and Google seems to have re-enabled 2FA via God-knows-what Android device and doesn't have a way to disable it (even after logging back in through a network where they trust me more). It's the kick in the pants I needed to finally de-Google.

mark_l_watson3• 3 years ago

You make a good point. Even being careful to always have a printout Google's onetime login codes, we hear enough stories of people being locked out of their accounts. I do a few things to mitigate this possibility: 1. about 3 times a year I do a Google Takeout data dump. 2. I forward my Gmail (which I don't use much) to my main email. 3. I love YouTube Music, especially music with videos, but I have purchased the MP3s for my 200 favorite songs and I will always have those. 4. If YouTube 'went away' both my wife and I would be very unhappy, but we would get back a lot of free time.

whitemary• 3 years ago

Suggesting that so-called "corporate capture" is a new or recent phenomenon is incredibly ahistorical. This sort of nonsense could only persist in a nation that knows absolutely nothing of its own history.

thunkshift1• 3 years ago

Both Democratic(new window) and Republican(new window) lawmakers have spoken out to oppose the US Trade Representative’s usurpation of congressional authority to craft domestic tech policy.

So they can complain about it but wont pass legislation to set it right? Seems fishy

pseudalopex• 3 years ago

2% of Congress signed the letters.

With new trade deal, Big Tech wants to be above the law

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