 a couple of minutes to introduce Susan. She is the research professor of international affairs and the GW Cross Disciplinary Fellow at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. In addition, she's also the Carvajo Fellow at the Government Accountability Project and was formerly the Minerva Chair at the National War College. She's going to be talking to us today about her work on digital trade, but she's also involved in a number of other projects, including those concerning repression and civil conflict. Transparency is a tool to promote labor rights and good governance, trade liberalization and public health. Also blowers at international organizations such as the UN WIPO, she's been involved or had her work funded by a number of governments, major foundations, international organizations such as the UN, ILO, World Bank and the like. She's really one of the leading voices in Washington and in the world on digital trade, so it's a real pleasure to welcome her here. So Susan, blowers here. Thank you. Thank you. So what I'm going to try to do today is talk about this weird relationship between digital trade, human rights online and protectionism. And basically it's a critique of U.S. policy, although I think there are some things that are really good. So interrupt me at any time with this Prezi. So I'm calling this the digital trade imbalance and in truth as I told some of you, trade imbalance is a term I've used before to describe U.S. policies, but I think that it's, we're in an odd position now in that I think many of us think of the United States as having the lead in terms of internet technologies and hence it seems odd that we would be so protectionist and yet the United States is the leading demandor of digital protectionism and more and more firms are asking for protectionism and this very much worries me because it requires an expertise and I'll talk about this that I don't think the U.S. government has. Often when the U.S. government is hacked we rely on foreign firms to attribute it and so to start using protectionism as a tool very much worries me because who's going to do the attribution and is that going to increase trust in the government and the internet? Somehow I don't think so. But let's see what you guys think. So I'm defining digital trade as cross border information flows although the U.S. government defines it as goods and services delivered via the internet. And the reason I define it this way is because digital goods are pretty easy to talk about and very clear but so much of cross border information flows have no monetary value and many scholars question whether or not that's even really trade but that's a different issue and I'm not going to go there but you guys can. So when I talk with digital rights activists like EFF they're often very opposed to trade agreements and they tend to focus on the intellectual property provisions but they don't seem to see the possible benefits to internet governments and free flow of information and so the thing to think about is that the reason I believe trade rules could protect to the open internet and in general I think it could be a good thing at the multinational level if they're done right is because they will make it harder for governments to censor filter or block the internet and the reason that will be harder for them is it could be a violation of trade norms so everyone with me on that okay all right so here's the latest figures that I have from the U.S. government and that's a source that I trust is digital trade is about 385 billion exports we have 12 of the 20 largest global firms and at least four of the other firms are Chinese and then there are other countries firms I don't feel uncomfortable saying this because do we really think of Google as a U.S. firm I mean it certainly has a U.S. character but I realize I'm very hypocritical to call it a U.S. firm okay but it's created a huge surplus for the United States Susan, can I put you there? What's in the 385 billion dollars there? So purchases of ads on Google? That's a lot there but it's also digital goods that are delivered for example a digital good would be if you watched a movie on Amazon. I buy you know a bicycle on Amazon have it delivered that's not considered well the the transaction was digital trade right but the actual trade was physical in a good I don't know why I said physical you could touch it feel it yeah it wasn't a service but there was a service affiliated with that yeah and oh so there was a statistics there which I really believe which is that 75% of the benefit accrued to traditional sectors of the U.S. and other economies right they've benefited from the efficiencies afforded by digital firms okay so the U.S. trade representative claims that TPP in fact will help protect and open into yet and yet they provide very little evidence to make this clear but I agree with them it could help if TPP happens which is a mighty big if and also if all the government sign it because all the signatory governments would comprise about 25% of the internet users at this moment and that their numbers are going to grow for Asian countries okay so trade agreements say very little but human rights and they say nothing about the internet because even though there's been plenty of trade agreements since the internet has been invented and became in wide use the TPP is the first trade agreement to make rules binding upon signatories and that's really really important because then governments must adhere to those rules as opposed to should right but they have something in common which is the principle of non-discrimination which is a human rights principle so trade rules offer in terms of non-discrimination three types of non-discrimination and the first type is most favorite nation which means that you treat every every nation goods and services from that country in in an equivalent manner national treatment which is you don't favor your domestic firms over foreign firms okay and then like product which means that you are not supposed to discriminate against a product that's maybe made in an environmentally insensitive way or in a way that violates human rights okay so you're supposed to treat all products producers and countries the in the same manner and that you know sounds very human rightsy and I think comes out of a similar logic okay so with that insight why is the United States so adamant about these provisions including them in TPP because all this came out of US pressure upon our trade partners okay who wanted much more stringent privacy regulations and they didn't want these rules to be binding but they agreed to it in TPP okay and the reason the United States is doing it is because obviously these are this really strong sector for the United States the United States is very concerned about digital protectionism in other countries and we're going to talk about the specifics of that in a few minutes and then we also wanted to have a very strong exception for national security and in TPP the exception which means that you can ignore the rules or violate the rules as long as you have a national security reason to do so and so that's an interesting thing now all trade agreements have a national security exception but it was enhanced significantly in TPP which is just you know something to think about in term when you're thinking about digital trade all right yeah yeah yeah so so so I don't want to spend we could talk about this at lunch but the language is much more specific as to what countries can do in terms of the national security exception and it's a little bit odd this is just my opinion not quite relevant to this presentation because we had the source code language within this chapter of the agreement but we didn't include malware and so what is malware it's just malicious information flows so that's something we could talk about a little bit later so just to clarify I want to now sort of blend the human rights of responsibilities of states and what trade agreements require and at least TPP would require states to do regarding information flows so under the UN it says that excuse me I misspoke under international human rights law states are not supposed to block access to the internet right in such a way that people can't express themselves right so you're not supposed to censor people okay states must provide an appropriate regulatory framework for the internet to function including civil liberties and the rule of law okay did you hear about China's plans to label every person in business okay well if China were a member of TPP couldn't do so under the internet rules there because that framework doesn't protect civil liberties and that's the kind of thing this is why I'm saying to you this could have a huge effect in promoting an open internet if it were to happen and that's why I support it moreover there is no human right for states okay they do not have the responsibility to maintain information control which will call information sovereignty because that's the term the Russians use and the Chinese use okay in order to maintain security for their citizens okay and that has huge implications for information flows we're going to talk about this yeah and a second because just to frame what you're saying right now we have this crazy world and David will kind of laugh at this where I think unions and a lot of civil society groups say trade isn't good enough the current system of rules sucks it isn't good enough and where I think that will lead us to is okay we're going to have trade agreements that don't have labor rights chapters or transparency chapters or environmental chapters in addition we'll just use exceptions and that means governments can get away with anything and I find that deeply troubling in other words you can say I'm going to every person who's blue-eyed we're going to put in you we're not going to let them use the internet for national security reasons because blue eyed people are generally terrorists okay and they could say that's we think it's necessary to our national security and you know another country could dispute it and that country would have to accept the dispute and defend itself but it's very unlikely because there's never been such a dispute but I worry about that that is possibly the future of trade agreements so I share that worry I was curious how that your statement saying under TPP there would be no right to information sovereignty well not saying that I'm saying that these are what the human rights we're going to get into TPP specifically because we need to be no this is great it's exactly what I want I appreciate it Rob so what does TPP say the thing is like other trade agreements and I think trade agreements are gonna have to catch up right they told they they address governments and they address market actors except market actors are firms and they are at times consumers but they're not human beings and I think this is kind of a problem when we're talking about information flows but here's what it says it addresses the so you have to go first to the service chapter to look at who's covered because the service chapter is the umbrella for the digital services which is e-commerce chapter and so it defines who's delivering the services and who's receiving the services so who's covered so an investment is covered an investor or a service supplier and that's important because it's unclear if it covers all users who may not be purchasing a service when they deal with cross-border information flows okay someone else might be purchasing that service so when I'm looking up directions at Google and I'm lost in Rio de Janeiro and I go to my smartwatch and I look up how do I get back to my hotel there's an ad on the side I probably won't even look at it that person paying for the service but am I here it's unclear I've heard both ways but it's never specified and I think it's gonna have to be specified in the future okay what else does it say well about digital rights it doesn't say much okay it states that in another chapter TPP says that any regulation including internet regulation must be developed and applied in a transparent and accountable matter and it must allow individuals and firms to challenge policies so that's political participation language that's in a separate chapter and due process language okay it's not in the e-commerce chapter but it applies to the agreement as a whole so it governs TPP okay but in terms of human rights it doesn't address it directly whether or not people should be able to access the internet whether they should have rights to free expression etc because trade agreements don't do that but I think they're gonna move in that direction okay so what does TPP say it has non-discriminatory principles which could give states the ability to challenge one government sensor or filter information flows because they distort trade they can be discriminatory so that's thing one okay but any government could say too bad I'm doing it under an exception okay and that's worrisome there has never been a challenge trade dispute towards a national security exception okay but TPP covers right now 25% of all internet users and that's a huge chunk of internet users and hence if it went into effect I think it would affect all countries because all countries trade with the big kahunas like Japan the United States Canada etc okay but TPP is not well liked and I don't know its future looks quite questionable to discriminate against products that are made in conditions that violate human rights so that seems to sort of go against some of the other things you're saying well okay in terms of but that's called like product right and digital services are a different thing so a product would truly be a digital product it's something that is tangible in the sense that you know there's something that is created that's not just a service that to delivering to another person okay so the movie is the product but I it doesn't say anything but like services so and again most of what we're talking about here is is really information flows which are neither a good nor service they're something in between yeah a digital product that was produced under what we would consider bad labor laws unethical labor laws we would then not be able to discriminate against such a digital product that's right okay so I mean you could still produce it let me just give an example of this Burma has long been a member of the GATT WTO okay and the United States banned certain goods from Burma but Burma never challenged that and the United States did so because Burma's tourist was notoriously corrupt and was quite abusive of people producing many of the things that it exported in the you know black market and in the if you will be real market so countries are very reluctant to challenge each other on these kind of things but maybe that'll change over time yeah you could exercise there's a public morality exception so you could ban that film or whatever under the public morality exception whether or not that would pass muster illegally would be open to whether or not Susan pointed out that other country chose to challenge it on behalf of this producer but there is an exception for public morality as well a moral issue well we have a little money you might you might view it as a moral okay yeah but we have a labor laws which define ours people can work and so on and so forth which would not be a which would not be a moral issue I'm not worried about point pornography morally or something blue off color and such that not the issue I'm looking at specific fair labor laws right that would not say to you is you simply use the morality explanation to ban that good so the United States could say we're banning goods from birth from Burma because it offends our morals so that would be the way that you'd caveat it that's what he's saying alright ooh so okay moving right along there's several other agreements that could have binding provisions on information flows and they are t-tip right the transatlantic trade and investment partnership and then the trade and services agreement which is being negotiated at the WTO but not by all the members of the WTO and so you know these these negotiations if TPP were to happen they'd have to have binding provisions too but we'll see they're all big ifs okay and it's hard for governments to find common ground and in particular I think t-tip will be bedeviled by privacy questions right because but if we were to rephrase that it's about the regulatory context and Europe just has a very different regulatory context in terms of information flows than the United States does we've patched together a solution but I don't know if that solution is going to hold in EU courts and so we'll have to see okay so now I want to move on from that trade agreement side if I guess I've gone a little bit I'll be going a little bit over but just to say about digital protectionism because I don't think you can talk about one without talking about the other and I'd be curious to know if you guys agree with me I'm so sorry I have my back to you which is very rude but you know how can this be the United States is so far ahead in terms of digital trade I mean you know the only country that comes close is China but the US you know in general is is and I think this will change China's gonna catch up it's great on digital platforms like e-commerce platforms but the United States is more and more calling other countries regulatory environment protectionist okay and I think that this is gonna bite back in ways that the United States should be very worried about first because the internet is evolving it's evolving in ways that United States may not have the comparative advantage and hence do we really want to be protectionist is that gonna be the right strategy to go so let's look at this okay so this is the internet evolution and all I want to say here is that the where I think the internet is evolving here I am at Berkman saying where the internet is evolving that's kind of ironic but I think apps and AI are the not the internet of things is really where the action is gonna be and the United States frankly is not as good at China in terms of turning products I mean Amazon's done great with Echo but you know I would say China is now leading in terms of product applications using AI and then the other thing is apps which are more and more used by people because they save them time and so our lead could be declining especially as population the internet population moves away from Western countries more towards Eastern countries all right so what's happening with US protectionism well every year the United States puts out a report on protectionism called the national trade estimate and what that is is businesses come in and say here's what we're finding barriers to trade so I just want to give you really quickly a couple of examples so national security procurement so Canada basically says you can't bid on our government email platform okay but the United States does the same thing for certain email platforms okay the Army says it wants to have its own platform and it's not going to allow a cloud provider from another country to provide that all right yeah yeah government procurement agreement which is a trade agreement that basically everybody who signs that basically says we're going to treat you as a local producer if you sign it there are certain exceptions to it okay privacy again just to do this really quickly the United States condemns countries that don't do enough on privacy and then it condemns countries for having too much privacy as a barrier to trade okay well are we the gods that decide what is an appropriate level of privacy that's gonna differ in all countries I mean just look at your children or your friends you know children have very different concepts of privacy than their parents online privacy okay okay what is the appropriate regulatory environment for the internet in 1997 during the Clinton administration the Department of Commerce came out with this report which defined the environment and I would say if that is what it's supposed to be the United States doesn't stick to that and that's okay I guess but what we said was we want to make sure that differences in national regulation whether it's privacy whether who can provide the government services whether it's this is national security regulation they shouldn't be trade barriers we got to figure out a way to reconcile this but we don't we condemn other countries for example how they treat ISP liability provisions I don't want to go too far into this but this has become a huge issue for for example EFF or public knowledge and this is why they they don't they don't think the United States does enough to help other countries have fair use type provisions but other countries have very different views about what is appropriate what is the appropriate strategy for taking down sites or whether or not ISP should have that function at all and I'm not sure we should be telling other countries how to do it all right this is where I'm really getting worried so I would say demands for digital protection is I'd like to write a history of this someday but I don't have anybody to pay me to do it and I think it really starts when Google says China is censoring the internet filtering we're having you know trade distorting effects and we just can't operate there and that's when they issued this paper I think David Weller wrote it it was a really interesting paper I use it all the time I guess it's out of date but that was the first time that I saw a firm really alleged digital protection and that's the link to human rights because these governments are censoring their own citizens and producers and restricting access to the internet okay but in another example so every year now the ITC labels countries it names and shames them that it thinks are have too many barriers to digital trade so in 2014 it was now Nigeria Algeria and China okay and they were very specific about China in 2015 so for example they said they have protectionist strategies including an opaque internet regulatory regime right if you don't know how you the rules that apply if a government's not transparent about it that can be a barrier to trade and their right to cite China's okay another example is this us steel case which I'm very very worried about so what happened is us steel right long excellent at getting protection excellent at asking for protection and basically they said that as part of a larger case against Chinese steel producers they said a particular Chinese steel company the government had gone in stolen us steals intellectual property online for a high-tech much more flexible steel bow steel came got that from the Chinese government and then bow steel has been using it dumping steel well wait a minute so that means the US government has to determine it has to attribute it it has to figure out the remedy how harmful it is to firms how do you compensate firms what agency should decide this I can tell you that the US government has not got its act together on this they don't know how to do this and it's not a public discussion and they should be thinking about it because things like censorship as you know can affect the stability of the internet okay so the only other thing that I wanted to bring up is can you use the exceptions to prevent censorship and maybe we'll just leave it for questions but I have some recommendations for the US government and I think the best way to determine this is to do it at the WTO to have a case and let's figure out what is a barrier to trade in terms of information flows okay and let's have a censorship filtering data localization trade case but it needs to be done at the WTO at the multilateral level to be credible okay that's my shtick so I welcome you thoughts words about what your your principal beef is I'm not sure I totally got it so I have many beef okay my first beef is that US policy towards the internet is incoherent right and that's what I wrote in the the brief for the Global Commission in that we're doing all these things in terms of trade to to help US companies and we say we're doing it to have an open internet and I think we generally want to have an open internet but we're not credible in saying that for many reasons first because we don't have any staff people who are out there looking at the implications of our policies on the internet and because we through the fly-vies but particularly through NSA are out there scouring the internet for information and we are also the country that is most adamant about taking downsides in terms of potential censorship and so we look kind of hypocritical although I I understand that we need to have some sort of strategy to deal with intellectual property online so I'm saying we we haven't figured out how to reconcile ideals for an open internet and for protecting digital rights with our trade policies which are the main means right now for regulating global information flows and I don't see people asking the questions to try to link what's being done at the Department of State with what's being done at the US Trade Representative's office and I don't think that will be down well for our comparative advantage in the internet sector if we become really nutty protectionist I think that'll have huge bad implications for trust online and for the internet as a whole expand a little bit on one of the points you made very early on which was calling like calling Google a US company how the the multi rep national role or factor of country country companies affects their relationship to these trade deals yeah I think this is where the rug what's the expression that something meets the road rubber meets the road yeah I think investor state brings it to the floor and there's a guy at at Cato who I really have a lot of respect for Simon Lester and Simon Lester he says he does not understand why the United States is so adamant about including investor state provisions and trade agreements which allow companies to sue states for regulations that they see as regulatory takings okay why are we doing this for companies that are footloose this is basic thesis okay why do companies get that right okay because until we had investor state and trade agreements and this starts 1993 we only had state-to-state dispute settlement and what state-to-state dispute settlement does is it allows you only and we should ask Mark's opinion on this but it basically says we're not gonna have flimsy trade disputes we're only gonna have trade disputes about really big issues whereas when you have state and firms to state disputes you're gonna have tons of little disputes and maybe that's not such a good thing there are other problems with investor states but why are we giving firm so much power when they're footloose and when that had principally been reserved to the power of states take away mark what do you think well why but mark served at USTR and I think it'll be interesting to hear his well I think you can obviously do an investment agreement as a standalone agreement between two countries I think the reason they've been brought into trade agreements is oftentimes there's a belief that you need these other components in order for the two sides to make a deal so that's how it got brought in the public wasn't focused on this I would say until very recently and particularly Europe I think they weren't focused on it when they were trade deals with smaller countries where there was a sense of an asymmetry of course our courts are reliable but not necessarily yours therefore this is largely to our own advantage but now that the US in Japan you in Japan US and Europe are doing these deals with each other and particularly some other cases involving public interest such as the Australia challenge of Australia tobacco labeling environmental challenges they've really elevated this to the public for so I think there's a real public debate going on about whether they should be included or not if so how do you address some of these imbalances but that some of the historic context for why we saw the trend move this way I think CEDA would sail through and T tip would sail through if you got investors stayed out of it yeah I'm so sorry it's Canada EU okay it would sail through well actually today they yeah so but I'm saying that the EU Parliament will be much more accepting and in particular Germans who have taken to the streets over investor state because of a particular case related to nuclear power but you know so just to summarize this so you know what should how should we negotiate trade agreements the notion is that we need business to be supportive of these agreements and so you can't get rid of investor state but that is the key provision in TPP and I would say in CEDA and in T tip that is alienating large swaths of the population obviously many people don't like other aspects but that issue that state that firms can sue states is very worrisome now we need to acknowledge the fact that the United States in their models for these chapters there's language that carves out regulatory it says that states need policy space so that their regulations are protected but no one seems to believe that because of history there's been too many challenges to state regulations by firms states wasn't way back when you know they had a big riot in Seattle about WTO it seems like that was one of the principal issues no because it wasn't in trade agreements I believe me I was there okay in 1999 no they just believe that the WTO empowers multinational corporations at the expense of workers and consumers and that was essentially the argument having investors state didn't exist in makes that problem worse well yes it but you know the United States I think US policy makers have made a decision that they can't leave it out because they'll alienate the business community even more and it's the business community that's gonna lobby for TPP and it's the Republicans that'll give it the votes to make it if it ever comes to a vote yeah I have a question about how you define these these flows these data flows because that really comes to the core of the question for me you had this example of being in Brazil and you know using your Google Maps and there's no money changing hands there at least you're not paying for it right you know there's the advertisers and there's Google who are exchanging money there and in a sense you know you are the product in those exchanges it's that's one way of framing it right and so you know when you pose a question that way are you involved there to put it in European terms you might say are data subjects included you know in this idea of these data flows and this is why you know I worked in Brussels for a while at European digital rights or Edry Mary Ant that's right yeah I wasn't on the TTIP portfolio so I wasn't following this closely but you know one of the things you heard was you know they say that privacy is excluded and Europe still has its right to regulate you know data protection on the other hand these data flows are in in the treaty right and if you take the European view that you know personal data is about privacy and regulating privacy means regulating personal data if you then say that personal data are part of these flows which must be free then you know that that's basically contradictory yep so I know where you're fusing that yeah I think it is a great dilemma and I've heard very Mariant and I are going to testify in a couple of weeks at the EU Parliament on just that my gut is you know I think there's no way to do it without having some sort of recognition of privacy and so I think the easy way out is to say make it stronger and clearer in the exceptions instead of spelling it out right by saying here's the rules by which we will respect privacy because the United States and the EU are not going to find common ground on that only because you guys you guys in the Philippines have a right that doesn't exist in the United States or in the real world the right to be delinked the right to be forgotten it we're just not going to find common ground on that I think so the only way to do it is through the exceptions and I think this is this is why we're trade agreements are going to go but that's a bad thing I think too David is there a bilateral deal or a national government that's got it right I mean is there a model even a partial model of how to do this out there somewhere in a particular country that Denmark or Sweden I was thinking Sweden but it but Sweden doesn't have its own trade policy but I mean more generally in terms of how they define internet right now no one's I mean the United States is is at least moving in the right direction but I don't see it in Canada I don't see it in the EU we just need to think more clearly about it I guess the question that I would ask right is on the one hand I hear you Susan being quite realist about it saying whether we like it or not this stuff is going to be included in trade agreements and it's almost politically necessary given the political economy of who's involved in export industries that it be included in trade agreements so given that that's the case right would you really prefer a world where this stuff is not included in trade agreements or yeah I prefer that it be included to be done differently inside what I want first is the United States to develop some sort of infrastructure to think about there should be like a committee to defend the internet where you have sort of an arms bugs man person arms buds person who says let's weigh the implication of various policy decisions on the internet as a whole someone should be safeguarding the internet I'm not saying it's a commons but I think we should start off with that premise then I think we need to figure out a way that we can encourage innovation online but set a regulatory context that builds trust and is flexible to accommodate different regulatory environments so that leads me to say trade could be good because of these nondiscriminatory rules but it also from the human rights hat that I wear it really worries me because having worked on trading human rights for years while I see it getting better and better over time I don't want human rights to be regulated through trade agreements so thank you for bringing out that essential hypocrisy in my own analytical thinking but here's the thing what I think about is you know I don't know if you guys ever go to you know the IGF global but you know when thinking about these things or net Mundial you know and at those kind of events people are very very you know it's almost like they have this image of the internet as if it's this wild and free you know thing and we can keep it that way and that's too romantic for me because the truth is where the population is is in countries where the internet is very very restricted and yet those countries have innovation flourishing at least some of them do Russia I mean if you look at cyber security stuff app development and then of course China now are those outliers other repressive states don't have innovative industries but given that that's happening where you have this weird context where you have a lot of innovation and yet you have repression of I feel like it's incumbent on us to the trade regime offers you this opportunity but is the price of that you know what is the price of that I need I need to think more clearly about it because it does offer you that free flow as the default and that is so important if TPP happens China is going to want to join it it can't right now because it just doesn't have the regulatory capacity but at some point it's going to want to join it and then it's going to have to play by those rules and that gives you the opportunity to challenge it in a trade dispute but maybe do it at the WTO which where China is a member even though it says nothing right now about the internet there's no clear rules there have been trade cases related to the internet and it offers an opportunity to like test these things and I would like the United States to start testing now there's evidence that the United States these trade estimate reports the naming and shaming is a way to publicly accumulate evidence to do a trade dispute but yet the United States hasn't done it since Google first complained in 2010 I don't think the the United States would choose a big kahuna like China it would choose a much smaller economy to challenge like an example could be Egypt remember when Egypt censored the internet and it does off and on you couldn't do it with a country like Iran because it's not a member of the WTO the boundaries we've been talking a lot about the international law sphere and trade deals what about below that in the norm sphere what can be done there to do more in these areas or is that kind of just a feel-good thing that companies and well two things so after Seattle now I'm showing my age but after Seattle I did a lot of work on corporate social responsibility and I guess I I am not a fan of corporate social responsibility I think it's I think it teaches people to ask companies for public goods or quasi-public goods instead of learning to influence government and good governance only occurs when there's that feedback loop where there's this give-and-take between the government and the governed and so while it can be helpful in providing some public goods some of the time it's it's very irregular right because as the company loses money it will pull back from providing AIDS drugs or whatever or roads or education for scholarships for the children of its employees so I wouldn't count on that and I it's nice to see soft law hard-law combinations but I don't think the track work it is and then I look at you know I have enormous respect for Rebecca McKinnon you know if you look at the index does it look so sunny to you what firms are doing I mean I I just I know I don't know I don't you know I like I have it reminds me of when I was a kid I used to look at department stores like sacks was different from you know Macy's and like is Google Facebook I know they're in different sectors and you know it's one better than the other one has a mission statement that says do no evil but I really don't know the interior workings is one really nicer and more humane than the other I'd like to think so but I really don't know so where are these norms you know I mean Yahoo got its hand you know Congress slapped Yahoo they were publicly shamed is Yahoo a good company now I don't know about so we kind of talked about so in Europe for example the idea of you know how maybe good faith regulation which isn't intended to have you know protectionist effects could end up having them anyway right it's not the main aim of these regulations yeah but so what would a bad faith you know regulation pretty clear right if I'm the EU and I really want to like you know you know support my own digital economy keep you out well local content local content local server requirements I mean those are pretty obvious data localization yeah yeah but I don't you know privacy to me like that's I understand how it could add costs but it doesn't seem like that's really an explicit trade barrier it's it could be used in that way I mean I've seen studies that show that the right to be forgotten has really empowered the big platforms because little firms they can't do these kind of things so a duck duck go is not gonna have a staff to like take down sites the way that a Google would and so is that really that what you want in Europe but I don't think US regulatory policy is any better I mean you know that question about who has it right does anyone do you all can you name a government that has the internet right maybe Estonia yeah like a relatively much yeah I've heard good things about Chile too but I couldn't document it to you but with that then if if we're saying Estonia hypothetically has it right how the I did the following question is any or even even if we did it like a Sweden or a slightly bigger country how do we scale that for not just the US well I think we ignored the other side of this the the I think a lot about I've never been funded for my work on this but trust online and malicious information flows and I don't think any government is handling that well and as someone who has done a lot of research on good governance and transparency that's one of the things I teach I am totally amazed that we let this happen that we have this market for malware that is totally opaque and ungoverned and that's okay I just don't get it at all and we're all threatened by it and it's traded and I'm not talking about you know Vasanar and you know export controls I'm talking about we've got to figure out ways to make the sale of malware transparent because I think it's it's basically eroding trust in others and trolls would be another example and the internet now that's not right right they're not but let me just could I well no but let's think about this I mean in terms of what the trolling that has occurred related to the Russian disinformation I can't document this for you because I don't have I haven't done research on it I don't know enough about it but it's my understanding from secondary sources that you know there's been a lot of disinformation that has been sent that's another question that I think trade regimes will need to deal with but is it propaganda is it really traded I don't know and I don't see any I don't know do you know of any scholar working on that yeah do you agree with that you know thinking about it that that it is an international issue now is it a trade issue most people would say no trying to suppress malware with a trade agreement seems to be like trying to suppress heroin trafficking with a trade agreement it's sort of like the the wrong tool for the job but if trade agreements govern information flows and they govern source code they govern malware right it's not it's implicit it's not explicit it's never been clarified but logic would tell you that it is there and hence it must there are things that you can do to make it more opaque make to me less opaque because transparency is a key norm of all trade regimes transparency of regulation and yet you have this essential black market but you know that's a very different issue that I hope somebody will work on no not at all if that's what you're saying no and if you made the market more open you know maybe there will be less higher bounties and there will be less incentives for malware I think the opacity makes it more attractive in some respects nobody knows what anyone else is doing so we really don't know what the pricing should be and it might reduce demand for it I don't think I've convinced you all well it was really nice to talk with you I feel like at least four or five different ways we've the discussion has reinforced your argument that the WTO is the place to do this it's our best effort because it's got enforcement power that substantial framework has it's got the rules that we want and trade agreements even at getting it norms one way of getting it norms is to do it through regional trade agreements if you have two or three regions even if it's two small ones and one larger one and they agree on something and it it's more or less similar clauses and those agreements that begins to kind of set a if it doesn't create law per se at the international level but regional agreements will you know help create norms in that direction I'm coming back to the Obama argument which is you know we need to get something like the TPP done because that gives us some leverage to help set the rules of the future rather than sitting back and letting them either be no rules or set by somebody else yeah I agree with that political mind-twisting about going back to all the negotiating partners and having some kind of a renegotiation that they might not agree to about some significant points before you can bring it back to the US yeah but I think you know the Clinton campaign I mean they have to be very negative about TPP but I think there will be a TPP kind of limited TPP and I think it'll move forward it just be rejected or accepted in total so if you if it can't be amended at this point right it can't it can't really be amended but but I if let's say Canada it seems to be moving ahead in Canada Prime Minister Trudeau said and I think if Canada or Australia or Japan moved it ahead there would be more incentives and I think there's ways to just I mean it's never happened before that I can think of but I think Secretary Clinton she's they will have to figure out a way to do it not to amend it to repackage it maybe if it can't be amended and it's not acceptable in its current form and it can only be voted up or down that seems like you have to start over yeah well I think we'll be we'll be seeing judge just Chief Justice Merrick Garland before not Chief Justice but Justice Merrick Garland before we see TPP pending the outcome of the election but I don't know the issue in the United States yeah but they're making all sorts of noise now which is very interesting to pressure the United States you know and I think you know some people in Congress will some Republicans in Congress hear that but whether or not they're willing to use I mean I'm not saying the late duck I think it happens if she becomes president and and you know has to do something but I think if it's president Trump we all might as well influence our legislators yeah I hope this brings to bear right some of what saying there's a lot of very complex questions surrounding the TPP not just on some of these larger issues but specific to the internet community yeah where you're dealing with an agreement that is imperfect but are you better off in a world with this or without it right and so Susan thank you for provoking us on that to think further and deeper about this question well thank you all so much for coming I really appreciate it