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

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

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

You can find a better summary in [1]:

> The TPP and USMCA have a broadly worded “nondiscrimination” requirement that could be interpreted as restricting member countries from enacting policy that, while neutral on its face, effectively has a greater impact on firms from a particular country.

> This risk is not hypothetical. We’ve already seen Apple and Google wield this argument in the context of South Korea’s 2021 law targeting anticompetitive app store policies, on the grounds that it has a discriminatory effect because of its disparate impact on U.S. firms.

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

Also:

> Expansive and absolute-secrecy guarantees for source code and algorithms are another key feature of the industry-backed USMCA/TPP approach. These provisions are justified as preventing the forced transfer of software trade secrets as a condition for market access (a concern animated primarily by Chinese actions in the past)

> several organizations have pointed out that the USMCA definition of “algorithm” is broad enough to restrict the sharing of even mere descriptions of algorithms with regulators, a key part of algorithmic transparency proposals..

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

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

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

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

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

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