Big Tech Loses One

Today on TAP: But trench warfare over U.S. trade policy continues.

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The giant tech monopolies, which keep trying to use trade law to defend their anti--competitive behavior and invasions of consumer privacy, lost a round this week. At a major trade negotiation session at the World Trade Organization in Geneva today, a senior U.S. official announced that the U.S. was withdrawing its own proposal undercutting national regulation of data flows, source codes, and antidiscrimination.

Those provisions were drafted by Big Tech and proposed as an official U.S. position by the Trump administration, in order to undermine national efforts to regulate tech by treating them as unfair trade practices. It took until now, in year three of the Biden administration, for the U.S. to withdraw these Trump proposals because there is still fierce infighting among Democrats over whether to block the use of trade law to undermine regulation of digital abuses.

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Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is close to the industry, and Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Finance Committee, is a big ally of tech and loses few opportunities to promote the antiregulation agenda of the platform monopolies. Though today’s action was a setback for Big Tech, such is the contention among Democrats that it was only provisional.

According to the official statement, the U.S. has not killed these proposals outright. Rather, the “internal consultations on the U.S. approach” are proceeding and “as these consultations proceed, we have had to take a pause on active engagement in these small group discussions.”

So it’s not over until it’s over, and this can be read as an invitation for Big Tech to double down on its lobbying. One can only imagine the internal jockeying that led to this muddled policy and compromise language.

So the tech trench warfare continues. Meanwhile, a coalition of progressive groups are using the occasion of next week’s Americas Summit to press the Biden administration to get rid of all remnants of investor-state dispute settlement provisions in trade deals in the Western Hemisphere. ISDS was another industry invention to enable giant corporations to end-run national health, safety, environmental, and labor regulation in the name of free trade.

This will also be the subject of a massive lobbying campaign and infighting among Democrats, who of course receive a lot of corporate money.

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