The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> BURCU KILIC: Hello, everyone.
Okay. Hello, everyone. So we are missing our moderator. She is currently moderating the net neutrality panel. We know this IGF is all about net neutrality and zero rating. She will be late. This doesn't stop us. So we will start. I am one of the organizers. I take the full control. On behalf of the panelists, one of our panelists is in another session, which is also on trades. There is a competing session on trade. He will join us a little bit later. And now we have another panelist, and I have no idea where he is. But I am hoping that he will show up. So let's start. The thing is, we have been proposing this panel, session, whatever you call it, this since 2011. This is the first year it was accepted. We are very happy -- oh, our moderator is here. Yeah!
(Laughter.)
Take it.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Sorry, everybody. I was moderating one of the main sessions. Manu, please join us to introduce --
>> BURCU KILIC: I didn't do that. I was introducing the topic.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Perfect.
>> BURCU KILIC: So this is the first time the trade agreements, the session on trade agreements was accepted. This week we both, Caroline, me and Claudio, we were trying to raise the issue of trade agreements because trade agreements is the way the rules are made, not discussed. So this is the first IGF session on trades, trade agreements today. And we have like rock star panelists. So we picked the best panelists there were, including myself.
(Laughter.)
>> BURCU KILIC: Someone called me the Trade Queen this week. I can take the title.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you, Burcu and everybody. Thank you, Burcu, for taking over. Net neutrality was taking over me in the main session. But as Bercu mentioned we have rock stars that have been developed on trade negotiations. Bercu Kilic, public citizen, she is a leading expert on eCommerce, copyright, all you can think about. She has a PhD, and a couple of published books. Julia Reda, she is the Paris Party Representative to the European Parliament representing our worldwide movement of young people who believe in using IG for all.
Marcel is an attorney with 15 years of practice in laws of privacy, copyright and so. He represents the ICTs and probably will assess their role on trade policymaking. Claudio Ruiz, one of the co-founders in Chile, widely considered one of the key experts on trade on the Internet in Latin America, and has actually joined many of us in the TPP rounds. At last, finally, my dear Manu, he represents the State Department here and he is chief of staff. Did I get that right? In a series of issues related to Internet Governance in this field.
So thank you so much again for all of you being here. All of you, you have three minutes for your initial considerations and we will open for questions from the audience. Audience, whatever question you have, come here and make a line in half an hour or so. So please, we have Claudio as one of our first panelists.
>> CLAUDIO RUIZ: So okay. So thank you, everyone, for coming. Thank you, Burcu and Carolina, for inviting me to join this amazing group of people at this table. I'm super proud to be part of this panel, especially because we have been pushing for a long time to have a conversation at the IGF regarding the trade negotiations and trade agreement. Not because we are crazy about grade. Actually I'm a human rights lawyer. My expertise is in human rights and technology. And actually, I think it is really boring, the trade issues generally speaking, you know?
(Chuckles.)
>> CLAUDIO RUIZ: Sorry for saying that at the beginning, but I really wanted to highlight that because the reason why some Internet Advocates are jumping into that area and the reason why we are talking regarding traded despite the fact not to be one of our expertise is because that is exactly the fora where the most important decisions in terms of policy has been made.
Actually, the trade negotiations -- I don't know really how familiar the people in the public you are in terms of trade, are the less multistakeholder space in terms of international regulation. I can't imagine any other space on the Internet policy area less open to discussions, less open to the public to comment. I think that is one of the most important and key points that explain actually all the problems that we have in terms of policy being driven by trade considerations and policies being driven locally speaking on behalf of trade.
And maybe the TransPacific Partnership -- I'll use the TPP acronym to refer to it -- is one of the most important trade negotiations of the last ten or 20 years. It has been negotiated in total secret and total opacity for more than five years.
And the thing is, the secret is not for everyone. The secret is for we, the activists. The secret is for Advocates in Developing Countries. As far as the U.S. trade representative has been leading the trade negotiations on behalf of the United States. Some industries basically in the states have been key to shape the Forum of the negotiations in terms of the TPP. The entertainment industry has been key players in terms of shaping that discussion on the trade agenda. I think I really wanted to share or highlight two ideas to provoke the rest of the panel in terms of how harmful the TPP in this case is. First of all, the TPP and trade negotiations generally speaking is the most perfect form of neoliberal policy rules. We need to meet our Congresses in Developing Countries to accept or reject entirely a negotiation being made totally in secret for them. The trade negotiations are being made in secret not just for us but also for our national Congressing.
Secondly, and this is the most important part I wanted to highlight here, the TPP and trailed negotiations will lock any future discussion on copyright. The question whether, what is the future of the, what is the copyright of the future that we really want or what are the rules that the public really need in terms of the Internet of reality shouldn't be taken in account with these sort of rules negotiated totally in secret and without oversight. That's what I wanted to point out.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you very much. Later in the panel we will be joined by Usman, who is the Head of Global Policy for PayPal. He is finishing another panel. And I thank you, Claudio, for calling our attention to these issues. Burcu and other researchers have been doing the exercise of mapping the last ten years of trade agreements and applying Internet layers, classifying the rules from the IP chapter, service chapter and eCommerce chapter proving that actually the regulation from spectra to DNS to copyright to net neutrality and other issues are actually appearing, data flow service, et cetera, are actually appearing in trade agreements which is hard law, as a source of federal law for a the look of the countries that are signatures.
Our order is Marcel and then Manu from State Department. Please go ahead.
>> MARCEL LEONARDI: Thank you, everyone, for inviting me to this panel. One thing I would like to emphasize and the reason we are here in the first place talking about trade is most of the IG community is very familiar with the idea of data driven innovation but not necessarily how much Internet-driven trade has actually changed the world. Twenty years ago if anybody with want to participate in global trade they would need to make really have investments, ha of a supply chain all over the world and now we take for granted these days, like search and YouTube and PayPal, all of these Internet ecosystems, it is easier to think of these multinationals, and you have this scenario in trade that is obviously under crafted, not necessarily by the agreements. I agree that when there is a need for transparency. That is exactly what I think Claudio emphasized in his presentation and essentially I think it is a good opportunity for the IG community to contribute to that process in the sense that we do these discussions in a multistakeholder environment. We publish the results of whatever debates we have. It is really something that should be taken into account. But I guess my more general point and already concluding I have very short time for these remarks is how we are per seeing traits around the world. Everybody is probably familiar with the debates around digital localization, for example, which is one of the key aspects that pretty much could impede the free flow of information and the data flows necessary nor trade to thrive. That's one example. Of course, I'm happy to take some questions. Thank you.
>> MANU BHARDWAJ: Thank you, Carolina. It's great to be here with you and everybody else. In my brief intervention I wanted to note it is funny to me, digital economy issues have been in the news a lot especially with respect to trade. But only a fraction of that presentation has centered on the huge importance of that dynamic digital economy and its implications with respect to cross-border data flow and I wanted to kind of emphasize this reality in the sense that our economies today are dependent upon huge amounts of data flows not only between the U.S. and Europe but also between the U.S. and Asia. There's a lot at stake when these trade agreements are negotiated. I want to cite numbers. 59 percent, just between the United States and Europe, cross-border data flows are already the highest in the world. Fifty percent higher than between those between the United States and Australia or Latin America. Forty percent of data flows between Europe are over business and research networks combined with the digital backbone, they deliver a huge range of activity that we have come to depend upon including email, social networking, Internet shopping sites, eBanking. A great deal is at stake as these trade agreements are negotiated and preserving important principles vital for the continuing functioning of our economy. I want to step back in this opening and say that the Internet Governance Forum, I'm glad to have these discussions here. It is the way to show intersection between trade agreements, everybody can participate and come and talk about the issues. The U.S. is represented in a quite large number and with respect to transparency and pointing really important, making important positions about how trade agreements are negotiated, it is important that we raise these views here and hear the voices here and take them seriously. That's one of the ways that the IGF has been valued by everybody in the U.S. government and across the world, is just that it is so inclusive and everyone is heard here and I just hope that through the discussion today we can really kind of talk about different views and really important observations that have been made both in civil society NGOs, industry and hopefully reflect that and take that back for myself to Washington and hopefully feed that into the process that is underway with some of the trade agreements. Thank you.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you, Manu, so much. And just to correct here to be sure I read your bio correctly, he is staff Coordinator for IT and Internet diplomacy at the State Department and works in all three branches of the federal government in the U.S. Lawyer, policy activist and diplomat extraordinaire. Thank you for that, Manu. I think actually one of the things you point is very important that came out as one of the conclusions of our free flow panel this morning, the difference between data information and knowledge. And how careful we should be treating all of those exactly to not create blockages, to things that people want. So, for example, patients do want to share their data. Consumers, that is going to vary.
Moving forward and also should provide -- oh, that is for me actually.
(Cell phone ringing.)
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Not for me. Actually to provide context from the European Union activities, my colleague Julia Reda from the Department.
>> JULIA REDA: Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here on this panel because actually my participation in politics and particularly running for the European Parliament started in the context of trade agreements. I was an Intern in the European Parliament in 2012 when ACTA, the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement was rejected. It was inspiring for me to see at least at the end stage at some point Parliaments can and sometimes will take the chance to reject a bad deal.
The experience with ACTA has highlighted some problems for me when dealing with trade agreements, even though a trade agreement in principle can be a useful tool for economies. That is that there is a mission creep. So ACTA started out as an anti-counterfeiting agreement as the name says, but went into online copyright enforcement and liability issues that would have had quite fundamental effects on the Internet infrastructure and the issues that we are discussing here. And I think this is something that we can also see with the bilateral and pluri-lateral agreements being discussed at the moment. The experience that I have in the European Parliament is that trade agreements affect us even if we are not sitting at the negotiating table and even if our governments are not sitting at the negotiating table.
For example, we are in quite early stages in the negotiations for the TTIP agreement between the U.S. and the European Union, but of course the room of maneuver of what kind of agreements the U.S. will be able to make with us are also dependent on what is already on the table in TPP. Just to give you one practical example, the European Union is currently negotiating common European legislation for the protection of trade secrets. This is not a new thing. The Member States are already protecting trade secrets, but the European Parliament wants to make sure that trade secrets are narrowly define. You can't just say that the fact I'm being sued is a trade secret, but there is a reasonable limit to what a trade secret can be. At the same time, of course, the United States in TPP is also about to vote on a trade agreement that has a much broader definition of trade secrets as a minimum of what is even possible. That means for us if we are going to negotiate trade secrets in the framework of are TTIP, the EU has to accept the broader definition of the United States or not negotiate on the issue at all. Every country that is entering into different trade agreements is already limiting the space of the way that the global development of certain issues can take place. We are seeing this with the length of copyright terms where we had really multilateral agreements setting a standard term of 50 years after the death of the author, but through a number of bilateral treaties over the course of the year the de facto standard looks like it is now going to be 70 years after the death of the author. So I think we have to be very careful of the treaties also in which our countries are not involved. And I think this poses particular challenges for democracy and for an open debate because we just don't of have the framework in place that would allow us to really have open ended democratic decisions about the global trade order with, in a really democratic matter.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you, Julia, so much for that perspective from the European side. And one thing I like to always reinforce in these debates is that actually most of civil society working on trade issues, they are not against trade. They are actually very pro economic growth and creativity and innovation. The majority of the proposals are actually exactly to balance the rules so that it is possible for everyone not just some stakeholders. I am going to pass to Burcu and I hope that Usman will join us soon.
Burcu, please?
>> BURCU KILIC: I have a photo here, I have a picture here. This represents the WSIS draft well. Three monkeys: See no evil, hear no evil and hope no evil. Because now we have to talk. This is regulated by trade agreements. Last week TPP text was released. Every time we raise the trade issue everyone was telling us like but the text is not available to us. What can we could do? So now we have the text and I want to show you the text and how the rules are made by trade. So we discussed here like issues like privacy, net neutrality, data localization, cross-border data transfers and I see how they were like shaped by the trade agreements. So the eCommerce chapter, this chapter has never been leaked and it was only will released last Friday, 3:30 a.m. Eastern time. I was waiting for that.
And it starts with the definitions, the language is like very technical, as you see. You know? Because it is the trade agreement and it uses the trade jargon. It defines the covered person, it is investor and it applies to goods, services, digital products, but it doesn't apply to financial institutions.
And then as you can see, there are scope and general provisions, certain provisions are excluded. There are excluded issues which are called nonconforming measures. It is trade jargon which we don't know much, but some provisions they don't apply to those non-confirming measures which are listed by each country. That can include any regulation, law such as privacy laws or data protection laws and each country has their own schedules.
Let's see the provisions. There's a provision on customs, provision on non-discriminate inventory treatment of Internet products but the most important provision here is on cross-border data transfers. As Marcel said it is very important for the industry to have like cross-border data transfer and they got what they wanted. But how about us? So with this, the TPP includes the first direct rule on cross-border data transfers, trade resume. There's an exception which countries can come up with legitimate public policy objectives, but the problem is what is legitimate public policy objective? The language comes from WTO, WTO agreements on general tariffs, 20 and 14. There have been cases on these issues, where countries wanted to use these measures, but the WTO said that you can't because you need to satisfy lots of -- there are lots of qualifiers and there are subtexts that you have to statute and there is jurisprudence behind every word here, legitimate public policy objective should be widely practiced, should be a widely practiced state policy. And it shouldn't be arbitrary. So everything here is very, very trade-specific language.
Okay. And then there is another provision on location of computing facilities which prohibits countries to require data to be stored locally and the same exception applies. And okay. So we will come back. Can I use Usman's time?
(Laughter.)
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: We will save Usman's time when he arrives. He did text me saying he's coming.
And I think one important thing to say is that the TPP was negotiated with a lot of Developing Countries and a lot of developed countries, and they actually, the text has been improved and balanced and watered down a lot. Actually, a lot of Republicans in the U.S. are criticizing the text because they wanted more. So we do need to recognize the effort of those negotiators really trying to balance as much as they could, but as Burcu and many others pointed out, sometimes there are exceptions that might not be enough for a lot of countries working on privacy and other issues. Health and other issues.
So I would like to open the line for questions. Please come and announce yourself. And one thing that is also important to understand on trade agreements is that this these multilateral trade agreements were not negotiated at a WTO round but they will be deposited at WTO and some of them we have heard -- I won't say which one because that still should be confirmed, will be deposited at the WTO for other countries to sign into them. So they have not had the possibility to negotiate and get nexus and footnotes that bring flex interest to some countries. Pay attention to what is happening in WTO during that time. Passing to the line of the audience, please announce yourself and make your question.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, Fernando, Director of USAID from Mexico.
>> MODERATOR: Can you raise his mic? It is very low. The volume, please.
>> AUDIENCE: My question is very quick. Should we accept that these issues are discussed on the trade environment in which the logic is to exchange tires for tomatoes and avocados and car parts? Should we accept that rights are traded in this manner? Should we leave the discussions to other Forums that are more adequate? Like WIPO or here or somewhere else? Does this logic? Or is it really a pipe dream and I should accept reality and I'm very naive to request that rights are discussed in open really multistakeholder fashion rather than in this trade logic?
>> AUDIENCE: Steve Zeltzer from APC Labor Net,labortech.net. This is a corporate-driven. Big multinationals were the driving force and they are the people who decide. The lawyers, who violates the agreement. To say this is an agreement that represents the people of the world is a misstatement. There are a couple of things I want to question, particularly the U.S. Representative, about what this agreement would do as long as electronic rights, democratic communication. One is, it would criminalize whistleblowing without mandatory exceptions for whistleblowers or investigative journalists. Two, amenity online by forcing every domain name to be associated with a real name and address. I think there are many others, but it allows more of a police state apparatus globally, particularly to suppress democratic dissent and debate which we have been discussing at this conference is a threat to the Internet. What protections do we have for a democratic society if these companies and governments have that information? And there is a backlash in the United States to this both democratic party candidates are against it, the entire labor movement is against the TPP in the United States and other countries. They see that as a threat to democratic rights. The Internet is being used to attack working people in the United States and internationally. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you for your questions. So I would like to open for the panelists, but just to raise that it has been a tradition on trade agreements, as soon as something becomes of economic value, to be regulated through trade because we need to move things to roads and through the Internet. So that has happened with Intellectual Property issues and now has happened with trade. Internet does appear in trade things at least since the Singapore U.S. bilateral and even before that. It is a reality. Now I will pass to my panelists to ask them, what should we be doing with this reality?
>> BURCU KILIC: Every time I talk on trade panels I always say one sentence: You can't negotiate open Internet behind closed doors. That's the idea. Like because when we talk about the TPP, we talk about open Internet, according to the TPP negotiators or the TPP countries, but it is impossible to hide the open Internet behind closed doors. The issue is the TPP is not the only agreement, there is TTIP and RCEP, the alternative to TPP, led by ASEAN, New Zealand, Korea, Japan. And Japan made the same proposal in RCEP negotiations. This is becoming a reality. And we have to be more informed about these issues because the difficulties like as you saw the text, it is heavily -- they use trade language. So this is another language that we are familiar with. And we have to learn the trade language and the trade law. And then we need like a movement against trade agreements. We did that for IP chapter. We all were involved in Intellectual Property negotiations, the TPP. We attended the rounds. We made presentations. We talked to the negotiators. We were lucky because the text was leaked a couple of times. Maybe three or four times in the last five years.
ECommerce chapter which has never been linked. There was no civil society input in or feedback in that text. That's why we ended up with these exceptions. Now we have to figure out whether these exceptions will work for our own issues. If not, we should discuss how we can be part of it because as Intellectual Property community we always believe that -- we believe that okay, if the doors are closed we'll find a window and we will get in. And it takes, IP text was approved in the last couple of years because when the U.S. first tabled the IP chapter, the standards were here. Now we ended up here. But this doesn't mean that they are good for us. Like it is, it still evolved or the standards goes beyond international rules.
So we have to learn how to live with the trade agreements, I guess, unless they change, stop doing the trade agreements.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Any other panelists?
>> JULIA REDA: To the first point about the right kinds of venues for these discussions, I don't think any of the venues are delivering perfect results. There is something to be said for WIPO that at least every country has a place at the table, but we still have a problem of a lack of public attention and hence a lack public accountability.
To speak of the example of the European Union which I know best, currently the EU Commission is saying to improve trade and complete the digital single market we have to have stronger exceptions to copyright especially for the benefit of research, education, libraries and at the same time the European Union in WIPO is opposing exactly these exceptions being introduced in the framework of international agreements.
So it is not necessary that the governments are even consistent in their own demands. And on the second point I think the concern about trade secrets is entirely justified. Just to give you one example that we had in the EU, where Volkswagen in the U.K. suppressed a publication of a research paper that pointed out the security flaw in the locking system of the Volkswagen cars in 2013. Actually, it was successful in having this declared a trade secret.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you, Julia and Burcu, for your comments. In my role as moderator I am not commenting on things and judging if they are good or bad. But here in this panel one of the main goals is to call attention for something that is happening.
Two other examples that are very important is spectrum policy and cybersecurity. Those both have appeared over the years with different languages in different trade agreements. Spectrum has, as many of you know, is something crucial for access to the Internet. So let's keep and eye on that in other fora like the world radio conference happening this week or next week which redefines spectrums around the world.
I would like to pass this to Usman Ahmed. He is Head of Global Public Policy at PayPal. His work covers a variety of global issues including financial service regulation, innovation, international trade and entrepreneurship. He represents the ICT industry and will talk to us about trade agreements and small and medium size enterprises, for example.
>> USMAN AHMED: Hello. Thank you, today I'm going to be speaking as an academic. I teach at Georgetown law, teach a class on Internet and international trade law which is the topic we will be discussing here. My comments are my own and are my comments as an academic.
I wanted to take a step back. Unfortunately I missed the first few minutes of the discussion. I think it is worthwhile for Internet policy audience to take a step back and first ask the question of what are trade agreements designed to do? Originally they were designed to combat a world where national governments would discriminate against foreign providers of products and services. And so if that is the overarching goal of trade policy -- and we'll get into some of the specifics of what happened with trade policy -- I would argue that's a generally positive things for the idea of a single, local, interconnected Internet. If you have an organization that is trying to remove barriers that are artificially set up to discriminate against foreign providers, that would arguably be a good thing for a single network.
And the World Trade Organization's kind of seminal agreement, the agreement on trade and services, the GATS signed in 1984 was designed to prevent foreign service providers less favor by than third-party local service providers. These could be used in the GATS to combat censorship, filtering and blocking of Internet transmissions which I think is something that a lot of people in the room including myself are very concerned about national governments engaging in. Recent trade agreements, we heard a lot about transpacific partnership unions recognizing data as a service that ought to be subject to free flow and protection and prohibiting national governments from requiring servers to be located in-country. Again I think things are that are generally positive from an Internet freedom of expression.
Trade policy in recent years has taken on more of an ambitious agenda beyond differentiating between foreign service providers and domestic providers and looked to harmonize regulations. I think that's where probably some of the issues that already been discussed in many agreements tends to arise for the Internet Governance commit. Things like Intellectual Property arise when you are trying to take international regulations and harmonize it within other countries. Trade agreements have been used to install longer copyright regimes, strict letter intermediary rules and harsher enforcement mechanisms which I imagine many people on the panel and in the audience have an issue with.
It is worth noting, trying to be balanced that the Transpacific partnership is the first trade agreement to acknowledge fair use in international copyright and first trade agreement to explicitly leave the exhaustion of copyright to national governments.
So those are the potential issues with harmonizing regulations in the Intellectual Property spaces, raising standards on countries that may not be able to meet those standards, but there are some positive things about harmonizing regulations. So the Internet enables a small business to kind of go online an instantly go global. There are a number of panels at the IGF about development and the development benefits of this, but that small business can in no way comply with 180 different tax regimes, financial services regimes, Intellectual Property regimes, eCommerce or commerce regimes. There are principles in trade agreements that would be very beneficial for that. In the TPP you have open access principles, principles on electronic signatures, on customs that are designed to make it easier for that tiny little business to sell their products all around the Transpacific partnership's countries. That's tangible positives that come from it.
Finally, there are things that trade agreements are not designed to do and we will be discussing those. Explicitly in the global treatment on trade and services and most free trade agreements, issues like national security, privacy, deceptive practices, plant and animal life, there a whole host of exceptions completely excluded from trade agreements. Whether or not those actually get applied or not is a question worth discussing, but they are in the text explicitly excluded from application of trade agreements. So some of the most significant regulatory concerns of national governments sometimes are supposed to be excepted from trade policy, but I think we'll discuss that sometimes they are not. That's worth talking about. I suppose my contribution, last thing I'll say, is that trade agreements do seem at a high level to promote some of the principles that I think we really value here at the IGF, but the concern is: What's in the trade agreement? That's the most important thing. What is actually in the trade agreement? The language of it? The way it's applied? Are they using the exceptions in the way they ought to be used? Keeping national security and privacy outside the scope? Those are the salient or deeper questions beyond trade agreements and the Internet. Thanks.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you so much, Usman, for that exposition. If we don't have questions here I am going to come back to the panelists and Usman posed a very good question: What should be in and out of the text of a trade agreement? If you want to comment on that? Burcu, go ahead.
>> BURCU KILIC: Before that, I'm checking the eCommerce chapter to see if there's something on privacy here. I can't see that. There is like an exception here but it doesn't really talk about privacy.
There is a trade exception that it is GATS 14 and 20 --
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: To be sure that the audience knows what we are talking about.
>> BURCU KILIC: I explained it, right?
(Laughter.)
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Before in the agreement, which was one of the last bilaterals before the TPP Korea and the U.S., in the commerce agreement you see clause free flow of data. There was some exceptions regarding to that. Since it was in the eCommerce chapter a lot of folks do understand that that actually impacts on privacy or not. For example, freedom of expression. That was a discussion taken. In TPP there is an article on privacy, but folks are very worried with all the exceptions, should that article on privacy. So there is a concern now, for example, if the framework in the European Union will be in sync or not with things like that. It creates dominoes effects in trade agreements and we can expect some of that trade agreements like TTIP --
>> BURCU KILIC: To clarify, Caroline, TPP includes 6,000 pages. You can do Control F search and there is nothing. There's a trade exception, but there is nothing about privacy. It doesn't say privacy. Just to clarify.
>> MARCEL LEONARDI: We can talk about this all week. I want to highlight one thing. Of course there's good things about trade agenda and there will be good things for the countries in each one of the 30 chapters of the TPP. It's a 30 chapters treaty, it is about copyright, of course, but also about border measures and a lot of other things that we care about today. I can see that eventually in this more than 6,000 words that are actually these pages, sorry, that this treaty have, of course can you imagine there will be a good text, but the thing that good and bad things are highlighted at the end. They are highlighted at the moment they have been agreed without any kind. Ability for national Congresses, for instance, to change it if they think it is bad for public policy in the countries.
My point here it is not about the substantive issues regarding what the TPP says or doesn't say. The most important thing is legitimacy and who are the people doing those decisions? They are not our national Congresses or governments even. They are employees outside of the governments talking about public policy in the future. That is a because as Ruiz asked some minutes ago, the thing is, whether we want it or not, these treaties are including human rights provisions and things regarding the Internet, including stuff that actually pain we like or don't like, but we don't have the possibility to change it even if we want to. We don't have the ability to do the changes even if our national Congresses decide the opposite. That is very problematic in my perspective.
The other thing, of course, the TPP has exceptions and limitations. The last leak of the last version included a public domain provision that was actually removed at the last version, but the thing is that sort of provision, really it's surprising. All those are provisions that include public interest, they are not compelling for the countries actually. Actually, they use wording which is not compelling the countries to enhance those kind of regulations but the opposite. It is not the same when you are trying to push for freedom of information, when you are pushing for extension of the copyright terms, so on, which is a little bit different thing. It is misleading if you compare both without taking into consideration the jargon of the trade agenda and the language of the text.
>> Thank you. I want to look at this text that Burcu is talking about. It doesn't say privacy. It does say -- nothing in this will -- to achieve a legitimate public policy objective. I would think that privacy is a very legitimate public policy aspect. They didn't say national security or any of the exceptions that are more borne out in other places, and that could be maybe to limit the amount of pages. I don't know why they wouldn't say that, but I would think that privacy would be a legitimate public policy objective. I don't know if it is or not.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Burcu, if you want the link for the text, another article that is closer to privacy is article 14-eight that does recognize legitimate concerns of countries people, but also and gives exception and some recognition of countries adopts their own rules on protection. But they should look for some form of interoperability among those policies. So, for example, free flow is not, there is not a barrier for free flow when that barrier is not necessary. So there is something there, right?
So anybody else want to comment? Questions from the audience, please?
There is a person coming. Let's just ... do we have any remote participation questions, please?
Raise your hand on the back?
Okay, since we don't have remote participation, thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Okay. My name is Juan. I'm the GAC member in ICANN, but I'm not speaking on a GAC issue. I speak on the issues of trade facilitation and national focal point. I just wonder, apart from the FTA on the trade facilitation agreements, WTO, which the provision is reaching the country right now and enforcement on the provision right now is six countries, 12 months from now it will be enforced. The huge chapter relating to Internet, the data standardizations, cross-border data that you need to send, for example, Thailand is also Relay related to the fishery for simplifications or if you have a boat and you want to fish, you need to report, all the way up.
And the data is standardization, which without that system you can not fish anymore. The farmer needs to register under what they call the blue initiative, which that is also related to privacy. I want to know, can you share about the trade facilitation agreement, TPP and all this that will be affecting us in general?
I think not any flow about this data provision is already there. We expect 20 months from now is when it is enforced. Sixty-eight country provision Category A which means it is enforced every country. That 29 domains were affected from this order, from financials, agriculture sectors, everything is enforced. And they use the world dimension trade.
>> Happy to clarify. Thailand is not a member of TPP so it shouldn't apply from them. The WTO organization agreement, 180 countries or so signed on to. Interestingly to the gentleman's point about national Congresses don't have any ability to affect, trade agreements have to agree to them. You said that like only 60 countries or so actually signed on to implement the trade facilitation agreement, you're right, they don't have the ability to go become and change the text but they do have the ability to say we support this or don't support this.
On the trade facilitation agreement it doesn't include anything on data or privacy or services. It is all about customs and physical goods movement. So it's designed to make it easier for a developing world country to send their goods to another developing world country because right now there's a lot of border measures that make it very difficult to ship a product across a border in a developing country. Let's stay high level. And these are designed to make it so those countries post their customs rules on the Internet and they have what is called a faster reviewing of customs disputes. Those are really the per view of the trade facilitation agreement and not so much on data and standards.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Any other comments from the panel?
>> MARCEL LEONARDI: I would like to highlight something that you are saying, we need to keep in account what is happening between Developing Countries and Developed Countries. It is a very different story. Maybe the U.S. Congress can eventually have that sort of power but that is not the reality in Developing Countries. Develops countries agree an important, even the FTA, these big treaties, a basic reality check provides you a clear view regarding the power that you have or the shape or the space that the national Congresses have to reject or accept a treaty like this. So the thing is, I think it is naive to think that our national Congress is going to oppose a treaty like the TPP when the TPRs is pushing very hard for it. One of the most important economies. We shouldn't be naive in talking about policies or with trade agreements either.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Serena from Malaysia. I thank you for this great panel. As you see TPP has so much jargon, it is impossible for a lay person like me to see the implement indication it has for me and people in my country. As much as I am frustrated in my government, in a way I do understand that they really have no options. And in Malaysia, as you were told by certain individuals many times, by entering trade agreements it helps to bring out our human rights standard because that is, provisions in the treaties which allows for that. But what happened was last year the United States came out with the report trafficking in persons which put Malaysia in tier three. But a few months before the trade treatment, it is -- it is a report issued by the Department of state or country performance on trafficking in persons. So last year Malaysia was in tier 3, the lowest possible ranking, but a few months before the trade agreement the Department of state actually amended the status and put us on tier 2, which is cosmetic in nature because trafficking in person is still very much serious in Malaysia. So to me --
(Overlapping speakers.)
>> AUDIENCE: All right, yeah. If you have any comments on that, thank you.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you so much for your comment and question. Again, I get two more questions and I'm going back to the panel and then you guys.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Mattias, Bjamemalm, a journalist from Germany and I have been covering copyright questions for the last 12 years that has a lot to do with trade agreements. Of course we all know about the complexities of this, especially when you are trying to explain these issues to lay people. You know, just to a general audience.
And what I would like to ask you is just more on a, I call it a meta level because you already said it is not about trade agreements itself or themselves, it is about what is in it. I guess we all agree on that, that we can't do without trade agreements in a globalized world, in a globalized trade world.
At the same time you are saying that we have trade agreements that have about 6,000 pages. Now, is there anything else that citizens can do? But the things that you do here going to panels, raising awareness? Trying to analyze these agreements and again raising awareness about the deficiencies of these agreements? Is there, do you have an idea of how to better negotiate trade agreements than the way that we are doing that right now? Because as a last thing, governments will always argue that they are acting in the public interest. Now, we know from certain experiences that that is not always the case. But the statement itself is still somewhat true because you have elections, you have legitimacy there. Of course, you need to find a way to better negotiate these agreements, but I have no idea how to do that.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm Mike Godwin with R Street Institute. When I worked for a previous employer, inter...
(Portion of audio lost due to Internet disruption.)
>> AUDIENCE: I read with interest, having worked in ICANN, that the IP chapter which again I hadn't read now -- sorry?
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Commerce service and teleco --
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much, the impact on ICANN, in ICANN which is an organization which is very transparent, lots of people talk about lots of things, from's been a recent debate on who is. Who is, is the data, the data of registrants when they register a domain name, a registry, that data, some of their data is displayed or can be displayed, but they can ask for it to be anonymous. One of the debates in ICANN is whether that data for a commercial organization should be anonymous. Some people argue it should. Some people argue it shouldn't in certain circ*mstances. So it was interesting to read that that was the very issue that was also included in the TPP.
Now, I just use that as an example. I'm not saying that's a bad thing or a good thing. All I'm saying is that while we were debating this for hours and hours and days and days and weeks and weeks and tweets and emails.
(Laughter.)
>> AUDIENCE: Why did we do it? Why did we bother? If the legislatures are going to come forward with a proposal, that's it. I don't care, you know. And I'm not arguing that governments shouldn't govern. Of course governments should govern. All I'm saying is that if you don't have that level of transparency, you make a mockery of that multistakeholder process. You make a mockery of what we signed up to in NETmundial deal. Thank you.
>> They are marking you or macro marking us.
>> AUDIENCE: Gosh, I'm a graduate student at Georgetown. My question is for Usman specifically. This is going way back up the thread. I came here because I'm woefully ignorant about trade agreements. What you were saying about the TPP makes a lot of sense to me and how it's in line with the ideology we're trying to promote and maintaining the Internet as interoperable and all of this. But the picture you painted, it's all about the transfer of physical goods, customs and what not. If that's true, if that is an accurate description, where are we talking about it here?
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: One question more and back to the panelists.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, my name is (indiscernible.) My question is related to international trade agreement for the official Internet Governance SIP. When you come to developments, the Internet of Things is not certainly developed. One of the reasons from my point of view, there is a standard for currency exchange is inarticulate. Is there any proposal by the international organizations to have a consistent currency exchange just to have Developed Countries easily access network or digital devices? The next question is related also to the trade agreements. When you come to Developing Countries, they are highly importing will Internet devices from Developing Countries. But when we. Go from IPV 4 to IPV 6 in Developing Countries, they are not supporting the new technologies. Is there any plan to give emphasis by the international trade organization to consider doing any trade exchange for digital in.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you for your information. Usman, I think -- Usman, I think there was one directly for you while the others brainstorm.
>> USMAN AHMED: Thanks for the question. That was, if that is what came across, that was a mischaracterization by me. So traditionally, especially 70 years ago when the first trade agreements were signed it was almost all goods trade. It was impossible to do any services trade because it was too expensive and too difficult to communicate with somebody across borders. Now we have the Internet and it makes it incredibly simple and services trade is becoming rapidly more important and larger than goods trade. Particularly, an this is the interest point that the gentleman raised about the difference between Developed and Developing Countries. Developed Countries get most of their revenue from trade from commodities and products trade. The interesting question, are Developed Countries imposing things on developing countries on services, things that they haven't developed that would be long-term harmful for them. Last thing I'm say, it is all about the actual text and how it plays out. I can't just be oh, it's going to do this or it's going to be incredibly harmful to the development of these countries. I need evidence of how and why before I can agree?
>> MODERATOR: Manu, to you.
>> MANU BHARDWAJ: This is my fifth IGF and what is remarkable to me is how important it is as a venue for these types of discussions and every year you come and there's a different like topic that people are kind of seized upon and really wanting to talk. What's great about the IGF everybody can talk on the same footing. Governments and NGOs and industry, we all have the same voice, we all can hear each other at the same level, voice the same criticisms, have the same suggestions. For those of you really looking to find a way to elevate the conversations, think about the IGF both national IGFs, regional IGFs, global IGFs, ways to participate actively in the community. One of the questions was: How do you get other people engaged aside from the trade minister? Essentially, that's one of the things that happened here. A lot of times the foreign ministry or other parts of the government will attend the IGFs. Of course we take back the messages we hear here back to Washington and share it with folks.
One of my general observations is that you should be emphasizing the multistakeholder evident owes that we have here in terms of trying to encourage more participation, more outreach to NGOs in other countries that are having trade agreements being negotiated. Maybe this is a processing results but think strategically but about how you can use this institution, the IGF to foster more discussions about these topics but also other difficult topics. I think you'll find it rewarding. I'm really glad that Carolina called this panel today and glad that I was able to attend at the last minute. I'm sorry I couldn't be more substantive than I was today but I will absolutely take a lot of what we heard from this panel back to USTR and my colleagues.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you, Manu, for your flexibility. We invited the representative who negotiated the foreign trade chapter, but he could not join remotely because of commitments and could not join us here today. Thank you for taking our perspective and taking back our voices.
Any other questions? Remote participation? Any he questions from remote participation? No questions?
So Burcu, one minute? Claudio, one minute? I would love to give one minute for final thoughts and then we move forward.
>> BURCU KILIC: Coming back to the TPP. As I said before, TPP includes 6,000 pages of text and 30 chapters and among those 30 chapters, only five of them are with about tariff or traditional trade issues. We are not talking about only trade. We are talk can about other issues which will affect us. That's the concern because the transparency concerns that Claudio raised, we are not part of the process. We tried really hard to get in. But we can't get in because it is not open to us. But we think within the industry they are in a better position, especially the traditional industries that contain pharmaceutical industry, agricultural industry, because the STTR has cleared advisors. There are 600 cleared advisors who have access to the copy and can give feedback to the U.S. representative on the text. Civil society is not part of those cleared advisors.
Another issue I want to say last but not least. For example, you talk about interoperability. Right? So there is a trade interoperability because Caroline also mentioned the systems of regulations on privacy regimes. And it is really interesting because there is a provision, that is the trade trap of what I call a trade trap. There is a provision in the TPP about that. And it requires countries to have a legal framework for the protection of personal and private information and talks about the interoperability of the systems which in the past has been interpreted as the race to the bottom. You know, whoever has the lowest standards, let's set that as the standard. And bearing in mind, you know, Vietnam, Malaysia and the U.S. These countries are not comparable, you know. They have different priorities.
So when we talk about issues like interoperability, like we have to see the realities of these countries. It is not only U.S. or Australia.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Burcu. One if I can story of something I heard in one of the rounds talking to one of the negotiators with one of the Latin America countries involved. I asked: But why are you taking these exceptions and limitations from copyright? Why are you not Boeing a little more hard on that? Your country now can enjoy much more technology than it could ten years ago. The answer was clear: I need access to minerals. I need to sell my commodities. So it is a very hard trade off that those negotiators can document guys can go to your country regulators, country Congress and country representatives and say what type of country we want, what type of economy we want in our country.
Moving ahead, Claudio and then the final round, please.
>> CLAUDIO RUIZ: I think that the evidence is very important, especially the policy evidence to take decisions. The important ones you are taking in the trade agreements. I would like to share with you one document from the economic research service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture from last year. And there is a table here, table A to page 21. I can show you the Leaning afterwards, that talks regarding the percentage difference in real GDP in 2025 and the hypothesis GDP of scenario.
In Latin America, in the change, it will be 0.00 in the case of Peru, 0.0.1 in Mexico and Chile. In Chile, let's say, we tried to gather information what is the real thing with regard to GDP. Chile was the only country with FTAs with every single TPP country. So what Chile is doing without any kind of important GDP impact in the future is trying to get rid of public policy decision in the future in the hands of these trade decisions. So I think it is important, the evidence based scenario. The thing is developing versus Developed Countries shows you that in our countries our politicians are not making decisions based on evidence. It is important not just in trade but in copyright and in other issues in the field.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you, Claudio.
So I would like to offer just 30 seconds for final thoughts please and then we are going to be finishing the panel.
Marcel? Julia? Your last thoughts, please?
>> JULIA REDA: Well, I think if we look at the traditional trade agreements it took hundreds of years for the economies, for the products underlying that to develop. And with the attendant economy we are still at a very early stage even though we sometimes forget that. And we have already signed some treaties that have set international standards at a very early stage. I p spend a lot of my time in Parliament trying to change the WIPO copyright treaty and it has some provisions that we have found after awhile don't really make sense on the Internet, especially regarding technological protections, for example. I think we should give the Internet economy some time to develop before seriously considering establishing too many international treaties, just locking us in and preventing us from making smart policy choices in the future.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you, Marcel?
>> MARCEL LEONARDI: I wanted to thank you again for inviting everybody here on the panel, especially the private sector on behalf of Google and essentially I think this was including the emerging sessions issue, right? I think it's fair to say that this is going to be one of the main issues in the future ongoing. So essentially there is plenty to discuss, there's plenty to be aware of. Again, thank you for putting this issue on the map of Internet Governance. I don't think people were really so aware of what is going on.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Manu?
>> MANU BHARDWAJ: I would add that I know that Rob Tanner wanted to be here from USTR. If people have specific questions they should be sending them to you so when we are in Washington we can consult with him and see what is possible.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: Thank you for that offer, Manu. So with regard to 2015 trade, if you have questions or resources you want to share, pieces of opinion you want to share, please do that so that is available to all.
(Overlapping speakers.)
>> Thanks.
>> USMAN AHMED: The Internet is a great equalizer and it enables anybody anywhere to communicate and potentially build a business or connect with people. It is an amazing network. If trade agreements are harming that, that is certainly something that we all should care about and should be involved in.
But I just ask that, where most of us are new to this area because we are U.S. policy experts, not trade policy experts, when we approach trade policy we need to devil in and say, as Burcu has done to an amazing extent, she really gets into every single line of the text. And commas! To understand what the implications are. One take away: Read her stuff. She is looking out for what are the public interest issues around this so we can understand them and stay away from the high level polemics that all of trade is good or all of trade is bad. It's not that I am simple for the Internet. The Internet is complex for most issues and these issues in particular.
It's great that these issues are being discussed. IGF is at the for front and this is an important issue going forward for the Internet space.
>> Just a brief thing. I really recognize the importance to have these sort of conversations. We have different points of view here. I think that is very valuable. This is part of the hard of the Internet Governance Forum and it is important for us to take these sorts of things into consideration when you are regarding trade. As I said at the beginning, maybe the trade agenda are less important in the IG space. There is a lot of learning. It is important to talk regarding the important policies that have been made in behalf of the trade, but affects our rights at the end.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: I'm sorry, our time has finished, but --
>> BURCU KILIC: But you came late!
No, I want my minutes. So ...
(Laughter.)
>> BURCU KILIC: You came late. Five minutes, Moderator.
(Overlapping speakers.)
>> BURCU KILIC: I was amazed how you guys talk together, multistakeholder, governments, industry and civil society. This is good representation of the multistakeholderism. We are discussing trade and I am sitting with industry and with the governments and with the civil society. This never happens in access to medicines. We don't communicate with pharma because all the doors are closed to us. So trade agreements unfortunately is reality is becoming the reality of Internet Governance but please, please, don't let trade agreements to destroy this, you know? That's why you need to pay attention to the trade agreements and discuss and learn and analyze and help the policymakers. This is pretty amazing. Thank you very much.
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: She got emotional.
I think we are going to have to do a group hug at the end.
(Laughter.)
>> CAROLINA ROSSINI: It is late, folks. So please, enjoy your evening. Go walk at the pool or beach, enjoy your time in Brazil. Thank you so much for coming.
