 Good morning. Good afternoon from Dublin. A very warm welcome to our webinar on digital policy and inter transatlantic relationships, opportunities and challenges. I'm delighted to welcome our keynote speaker, Dr. Francis Burwell, distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC. We're very welcome, Francis, and we really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to be with us, make your presentation and to interact with our audience. So we're really pleased to have you and we're also pleased that you got up so early because it's it's it's much earlier in Washington DC than here. So thank you very much for that as well Francis. My name is Joyce O'Connor and I chair the digital group here at the Institute of International and European Affairs. Francis presentation would take around 20 to 25 minutes, and I look forward to receiving your questions to Francis through the Q&A function and chat at the bottom of your screen. Please feel free to join our discussion on Twitter and our handle is at IIEA. That's our Twitter handle today's presentation and your Q&A is on the record. Today's presentation is also been streamed live. So we're very pleased to welcome all of you who've tuned in via YouTube. Today's webinar is very timely. I think every time you turn on the radio here in Ireland, there's a lot of talk about the transatlantic relationship. Francis, however, will discuss the transatlantic relationship from the perspective of digital policy. Dr. Bernal holds that the EU is moving forward with an ambitious digital agenda, a vision of what it could be like in the future. Why the Biden administration is endeavoring to address digital policy at a much slower pace. She will examine the tensions and disagreements in the transatlantic relationship and assess the possibilities of EU-US cooperation. Francis will also examine the role of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council in contributing to and developing digital policy cooperation. Francis has a very distinguished career. Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, Dr. Bernal was executive director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Merlund and also was the founding director of Women in International Security. She is currently a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington D.C. and a Senior Advisor to Maclaurty Associates. Until January 2015, Dr. Bernal served as Vice President of the European Union and Special Initiatives at the Council. She has also served as Director of the Council's Transatlantic Relations and Interim Director of the Global Business and Economics Program. She currently directs the Transatlantic Digital Marketplace Initiative. Her work focuses on the European Union and the US-EU relations as well as a range of transatlantic economic, political and defence issues. She has published widely and her most recent publication is Engaging Europe, a Transatlantic Digital Marketplace Initiative. Francis holds a doctorate from Merlund University and an MFIL from Oxford University. We look forward very much Francis to your presentation and thank you very much again for being with us today. Thanks very much, Professor O'Connor. Many thanks to the Institute for the invitation. It's an honour and a pleasure to speak to you and to share a stage sort of in a virtual way with Professor O'Connor. Let me start with a few words on US-EU relations generally before focusing on the digital and tech aspects because I think it's good to put this in a context. The Biden administration came into office after four years of neglect, if not outright hostility, on the part of President Trump to the Transatlantic Partnership and particularly towards the European Union. The Biden administration, however, was not concerned simply with repairing the US-Europe relationship writ large, but also made clear that it saw the European Union as a major partner. This is very unusual. The US usually deals with Europe primarily through NATO, where we are a member, and or through key national capitals. The EU traditionally has been seen in the foreign policy community here in Washington as a mere trading partner and an economic actor. And as an institution that rarely gets its act together. That's the story on the EU. So it was very unusual. I don't remember an administration that came in with such a focus on Brussels. The Biden administration made clear that it saw the US-EU partnership as something more, including foreign policy, and set out to repair relations very quickly. And one major indicator of that was the appointment of Chris Hoff as the negotiation negotiator on data transfers on the very first day of the administration. We haven't yet reached an agreement on data transfers, as I'm sure the audience is very well aware, but it was an indicator of the administration's good intent. Since then, we have seen what I would say is a really focused effort to get rid of the specific tensions in the relationship, the specific cases that have caused irritation. In June, we had the not settlement of Airbus Boeing, but the agreement to park it for five years and to discuss subsidies, subsidies. We had a very successful US EU summit in June as well, which at which the announcement was made that we would establish a US EU trade and technology council. It is often extremely difficult to get American presidents to go to a US EU summit. And this happened during a trip by the president in Europe, so NATO summit one day and EU the next and on to other meetings. But the fact that it happened so quickly in his administration, the fact that there was really no resistance to it on the part of the White House, I think is a real step change. We had in August the OECD tax negotiations reaching a consensus of people that I know Ireland was watching very closely with finalization in the autumn. A lot of questions still remain about when it will be implemented and, and who will implement first but this was removed a big irritant in the relationship. And then in the end of October we had the agreement to suspend our steel and aluminum tariffs imposed under section 232 and the EU agreeing not to undertake its retaliatory measures, while we negotiate some kind of an arrangement focused on green steel and rebalancing. In September, we had the first meeting of the TTC and Pittsburgh, which I will come back to, but I will just say that it was a very successful meeting for a first meeting. This repair of the relationship went beyond economics, however, in foreign policy we're now seeing one of the results of this repairing, which is the ongoing discussions about sanctions vis-a-vis Russia. There have been numerous contacts between Brussels and Washington as well as member state capitals to talk about this. Defense policy, we have the negotiation of an administrative agreement with the European Defense Agency. And in climate I think we can talk about a reborn partnership, lots of questions about who will achieve targets and how exactly this will be done, but I think that the effort is certainly there in the desire to be partnership. So therefore we have now, after the first year of the Biden administration, a much more engaged relationship with a broader scope. And I would point out that this has happened even though our new ambassador to the European Union has only just arrived in Brussels about a week ago. So we have been abnormally slow in getting our ambassadors in place, but nevertheless, the US and EU partnership is probably in better shape than it has been for quite some time. But that doesn't mean that it's going to stay that way. And I think that one of the areas where we are likely to see increased tensions is that of tech and digital policy space. I want to make some general remarks about that space and then point to some specific issues and then I'll talk about the TTC. The first point to make is that the US and EU digital partnership matters. I know this audience is well aware of the strength of the US EU economy. But this is the biggest digital relationship in the world. The total of US EU trade in 2020 of what's called potentially digitally enabled trade both imports and exports was $222 billion. In contrast, the comparable amount of US China trade in digitally enabled, a digitally enabled trade was one tenth of that at $26 billion. Sometimes when you read the news reports it sounds like it's going to be the other way around, but even Ireland, Ireland US trade was $72 billion in potentially digitally enabled trade. Moreover, when US companies go abroad to make money, they go to Europe. The EU accounts for roughly half the information services sold through their affiliates abroad. So clearly the European market is one where US companies really want to be. Second, we are both the US and the EU are in the middle of a rethink about our domestic economic policy and what that means for open commercial borders, supply chains, etc. The pandemic has brought about the pandemic as well as other things such as China have brought about a larger shift in the discussion that I think provides an important context for what is happening in tech and trade policy. We also have in the United States a growing debate about competition policy. I will point out, however, that when the administration released its executive order on competition policy, the vast majority of it was in the non tech area, even in railroads, agriculture and manufacturing. And it only called for a study on the impact of tech on competition policy and competition in the US economy overall. Third, we are not coming at digital issues from a similar background or experience. The US has always had a very less a fair attitude towards regulation. We tend to let new technologies emerge and decide later if we want to do anything about them. We are, for example, not talking even yet about a national privacy legislation with any seriousness. The EU, on the other hand, I think has never met a technology it didn't want to regulate in some way operates very much on the precautionary principle if it might hurt or might be dangerous we should regulate it right away. And at the same time has very global ambitions for the impact of its regulations and has been successful in that way I think we need to point to the GDPR as something that has kind of set the stage for the impact of European regulatory policy around the world. And we also come at this from very different economic experiences with the tech industry. One statistic, looking at the value of the top 100 platforms globally, which region has a percent, what percent of that value. The US has 66% of the global value, the Asia Pacific has 29% and Europe has 3%. We're now seeing an influx of venture capital into Europe but there's a very long way to go. Fourth, our governments are not in a similar place as far as policy capabilities or their institutional approach. Thank you and particularly this commission came into office and set out major two major priorities the Green Deal and the digital policy, and the digital age, and therefore has set out a whole series of legislative initiatives which will talk about to achieve that it's a very rational. It could be written by a policy student is a very rational way forward and the way it's it's addressing the issue. We don't have issues with particular elements of it, but I don't think there's anything that one can criticize in terms of the overall. We see this as a policy experience and this is what we want how we want to address it. The US is much more decentralized, we digital policy was not an issue in the presidential campaign. It is not one of the priorities of the Biden administration, and we are not set up with a an executive vice president for the United Middle Ages. So that is split among several different departments, all of which have other responsibilities. So I think that this is getting the two sides together is sometimes difficult to know who to get in the room. Then there is a Europe, the final general point I'll make is that there is also this European focus on strategic autonomy. Which in this space is referred to often as digital or tech sovereignty but they're basically a related concept. It started in the foreign policy and defense space and his long call is confusion in the US policy community. What does it mean for NATO autonomy from whom from us. It helps build capabilities though in the defense space we hope. And so we will be tolerant of it. European discussions about tech sovereignty digital sovereignty have recently become more challenging. Many do understand a few at least understand the reasoning behind it. Vice President Vestiger has a very good line that she uses in the United States, talking about how would you look at the world. If your social media, the dominant social media company was French. If you bought everything off a Japanese mail order company. And if you when you did a search, everything you did was on a Spanish company and Americans just haven't thought about the world in that way, and yet that is the European experience. So to a certain extent, everyone understands the desire of Europe to build its capabilities to upscale its startups, and to have a more ambitious European digital economy. But when does that crossover into restricting other companies it's one thing to support as happens through the horizon 2020 program and other initiatives and that the commission is is funding that happens to, excuse me to expand the European digital economy. It's another thing to actually restrict or discriminate against non EU companies that are part of that market. Some European officials and MEPs have made clear that Europe's ambition is to rein in big US tech, but others are more nuanced and speak about keeping markets open for everyone so there's confusion about what this means what digital autonomy tech sovereignty means. And we're still waiting to see the way to see is the legislative proposals that's where the rubber hits the road. So, let's talk about some of those proposals. First off, the big issue that I think is a bit of a sleeper because it's not a legislative proposal is data transfers. As all of you know, we have had negotiations ongoing since day one of the Biden administration. I'm told there have been some very imaginative proposals and there have been has been great progress. However, we don't have a solution. For the last few months I'm always hearing that it's going to be another month. And it's not clear to me exactly when the timeline will will mature. The key issue remains how to protect the data of EU residents who might be swept up in US national security surveillance and how to give them appropriate redress should that happen. Both the US and the Commission who are negotiating this realize that whatever solution they come up with will go to the courts. We do expect a shrimps three. And so the Commission in particular is being very cautious, because they certainly don't want to be found out a third time by the courts. In the meantime, in the past few weeks we've had some national data protection authorities cast doubt on the standard contracting clauses and their ability to continue to transfer data. And this is raising the temperature on this issue. A related issue is that concerning the US Cloud Act. I'm sure that many of you will recall the case in which I think it was Microsoft was asked by US law enforcement to provide data on some suspected terrorists I think it might have been, and the data was held on a server in Ireland. And so therefore this placed the company in the middle of a conflict between US law and GDPR. And in response to that or following that the US passed the cloud act, which requires US based companies to turn over data, no matter where it's stored. In response to this, the French have just implemented a new version of their cloud certification scheme, which requires service providers, dealing with public entities ie storing data that the government has collected within 25% non EU share ownership. Some critics will note that this is similar to what China does in terms of limiting foreign ownership. A recent conversation that we held at the Atlantic Council with the Minister of Digitalization, Sidrick Oh made clear that this is about protecting French citizens data from the cloud act. And this is now up to the Digital Markets Act, which is probably at the moment the most contentious piece of legislation, as far as the transatlantic relationships goes, the US government came to this a bit late. It's always very difficult to get serious changes done once the commission has has issued its proposal. But the US government is now pushing fairly hard. The major issue is that it looks like all the gatekeepers will be US platforms. And so to whether or not there's a real distinction and we can go into that in the Q&A about how the thresholds might have been set. And, and whether there is a real distinction between the American platforms and other companies, politically, having a European legislation move forward when it looks like the only companies that it will affect our American. It's just not very good for the US EU relationship. It will seem discriminatory even if that was not the intent. And I see that the US Senate Committee on Finance has issued a letter addressing this for the EU. I also think it's difficult to have one set of rules for the gatekeepers and not for others and and the DMA does impose certain restrictions on the gatekeepers. All startups want to be gatekeepers essentially. That's their ambition. And should they base their business model on one set of rules and then have to switch later. There is also in this in the debate about the DMA some concerns about trade secrets and protecting data that the companies have spent a lot of time and energy and money to collect. So I think there's a wide degree of issues to talk about there. Other issues are not as sensitive or likely to be as tense, but do show some some differences and there will be some things to address. DSA, the Digital Services Act, has a lot of burdensome reporting. But let's face it, Google and Microsoft and many others they have a lot of lawyers and, and people and they can afford to handle this it really is going to be a challenge primarily I think for European startups. I think the main concern of US companies is the national laws that specify superfast takedown periods, and also the review of recommender systems i.e. algorithms, in order to keep. Sorry, recommender systems by researchers and who are the researchers, what are the safeguards for keeping the recommender systems the algorithms secure. And what will that mean to the new network of digital service coordinators that this law will set up. Will they evolve into something like the data protection supervisors. And what will that mean I think that there are a lot of questions about that type of enforcement mechanism that we should look at the AI act is something where we have a lot of questions but not a lot of issues right now. What are the issues, what is AI, what's the definition that's going to be used in the act. What is high risk versus low risk. How does it work with other products safety regimes in the EU that US companies are already dealing with. And when is facial recognition allowed. Certainly I find more facial recognition in my everyday life. And so, when is it going to be allowed there clearly are real restraints on biometric identification in the AI act. When is human supervision needed. How will non EU companies prove that their AI has been trained on trustworthy appropriate data. When we turn to the data governance act and the data act, we don't yet have the data act actually, and it's supposed to come out in February. The rumor has it that it is intended to be the GDPR for industrial data. What does that mean, does it mean that there will be restrictions on foreign companies accessing the data, or will there be restrictions on foreign companies non EU companies in say for example government procurement contracts that are involving that data. We just don't know yet so we'll have to. Those are the types of things that we are looking, looking to see in the proposal. And we have seen some change in the data governance act from the first draft that we saw to the final proposal. So there is movement capability of movement but we'll have to see what it finally is. Let's say that there's a huge amount of work that can be done between the US and the EU in a very positive sense. cybersecurity standards discussions about infrastructure resilience, cryptocurrency and money laundering. And this idea of moving together in certain areas is the fundamental idea behind the US EU trade and technology council. So Connor said the EU US trade and technology council and I say US EU. And it's interesting that when you go to the two websites. They each have a note saying there's a parallel set of documents that says it in the other order, but nevertheless. So forgive me if I use the American nomenclature. So I've long advocated for some kind of digital council similar to the US EU energy council. So I'm not a neutral observer. I was a bit hesitant about it being linked to trade issues. But I think given the Biden administration, this is what was needed in order to bring everyone to the table and so that's fine. The US and EU can be a crucial element for bringing the US and EU closer together on these issues, but it faces some very real challenges. And I want to point out right away that the track record for US EU dialogues is not very good. A lot of them simply fail, they don't, they're just never scheduled the second or third or fourth time and kind of fade into obscurity. And still the first meeting in Pittsburgh in September must be branded a success, even though it didn't accomplish everything we had hoped. The biggest failure was to agree on when to meet next and they're still struggling with that, although I've now heard that they expect it to be in May, it will be in, it will be in Europe and it will be in person. And so this is the issue because you have to get the Secretary of State, the US trade rep, and the US Commerce Secretary all over to Europe at the same time. So, and then you have to get to Vice Presidents of the Commission to be there at the same time as well. And still the main purpose of Pittsburgh was to get these five leaders into the room to create a culture of cooperation, and to make sure the working relationships were were good and I think in that way it was a big success. And so in the Pittsburgh statement detailed the 10 working groups what they were going, the scope of each and what they hope to accomplish over the first working period. The US and the EU have agreed on a limited ambition. This is not a proto T tip it is not going to lead to trade negotiation it is not going to evolve into a trade negotiation of any kind. In fact, I think one of the working level people and talking to me has made the point that this is really about avoiding the stupid trade disputes, the ones that no one intended. And to avoid surprises so that when you go to international standard setting bodies and the EU puts its, its position on the table that the US will have known that in advance and not be supervised. Second point is we can address the issue of China without mentioning that country but instead agreeing on what has to be done. There's a lot in the press before the me Pittsburgh meeting about would Europe resist the US aggressiveness aggressive approach towards China. Well, the answer is no, because actually Europe has a lot of things such as the toolkit on cyber security, where it has outlined what makes a suspect country or a suspect vendor. And it fits right in our definition of what we're looking for in terms of China just doesn't mention the name. And that seems to be the pattern. Third, the TTC is not the place for dispute resolution. We've noticed that Airbus Boeing steel digital service taxes data transfers these are all handled outside the TTC. And the challenge for the TTC lies ahead with the second and third meetings. So they're planned for every six months, or every semester. And the big question is what will be the deliverables, how to keep the top people engaged. The problem that has always been with us you technical dialogues has been that they need top level people to make them move forward to provide the political impetus. The agreements are so technical the topics are so technical that those people. It's hard to keep them interested. And it's hard to keep them thinking that this is worth their time. We now have 10 working groups. Some are moving forward. Some less so. We'll just have to see I think it would be unrealistic to expect 10 working groups to all move together and to all be successful. And some will kind of fade. But we do have priorities now. We have investment screening, export controls, artificial intelligence and supply chain semiconductors, not all of them tech in the way that we think about it. So what will the deliverables deliverables be for the French meeting. What will they be for the next meeting after that. At any time, the TTC has made very clear in the Pittsburgh statement that it is not going to bother. It's not going to interfere with the sovereign right, both the US and the EU to pursue their own legislative agenda. And so we have an issue here in that if the US companies that have been big stakeholders in the TTC and big supporters of the TTC, don't think that this is helping them. Will they continue to support the TTC. My own view is that the TTC is a long game that it is about creating consensus and creating a common, a more common vision of the way to approach tech without creating barriers across the Atlantic. And that it's going to take some time for us to see the real results. And the question is keeping it going before we start to see those results. And I'm going to end there and just say that 2022 is going to be a key year, a very interesting year in US, EU tech and trade policy. The EU is moving ahead. The US is starting to move, but it's not clear exactly where or what the tech regulation will be, aside from competition policy and even that's not clear. What is clear is that tech and digital policy is much higher on the transatlantic agenda than it has ever been before. And I'll stop there. Thank you.