This week marks the start of my research into the various levels of e-commerce and how they fit into Free Trade Agreements. One point that was made in several of the articles was that one can’t have e-commerce without the ‘e’ — referring to the fact that personal computers and internet access are necessary precursors to building e-commerce in a country. This ties into issues of the digital divide, in the case of DR-CAFTA, in both the US and its developing country partners.

To me, Chapter Fourteen of DR-CAFTA reads pretty weak on the issues that are commonly associated with e-commerce, such as internet governance, security and reliability issues, content regulation and so on.

Recognizing the global nature of electronic commerce, the Parties affirm the importance of: (a) working together to overcome obstacles encountered by small and medium enterprises in using electronic commerce;… [Link]

Though in the USTR’s summary of the agreement, the parts in the chapter regarding customs duties and non-discrimination are ‘a major advance over previous international understandings on this subject.’ [PDF Link]. (more…)

News and links for this week

The WTO’s Appellate Body released it’s annual report this week. [Link]

France (EUR 750,000), Lithuania (CHF 46,087), and Estonia (CHF 15,000) donated to the Doha Development Fund, which provides training and activities for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Developing Countries. None of the DR-CAFTA countries are LDCs — indeed Haiti is the only LDC in the Americas — however all members save the United States are ‘developing countries’ and thus can potentially take advantage of this fund.

Via the International Economic Law and Policy blog, the WTO has announced its interim report (which I believe is only available to the parties) in the dispute over internet gambling with Antigua and Barbuda. For more on this, you might try this article. [Link]. Looking at such diverse areas as internet gambling will be one of the areas that we will touch on with this study of FTAs and IT-based businesses.

DR-CAFTA member Nicaragua is stepping closer to joining ALBA — a ‘framework agreement’ was approved by the Venezuelan National Assembly for a trade deal / cooperation agreement between the two countries. [Link to bilaterals.org]. See also this past post.

Doha – is it live or is it dead? Daniel Ikenson discusses some of the bigger picture items surrounding the future of world trade from a US perspective over at Cato. [Link].

This post is a little different, so hold on to your hats.

I attended a lecture/talk at a meeting of the Legal Theory Reading Group here at the University of Edinburgh last night by Professor Zenon Bankowski about a new paper he is working on. I’m certainly no legal theory expert, but this is what I gathered was the core of his idea:

• The act of giving necessarily means that you will change because of that gift — this is related to the idea that you expect/get something in return whenever you give, even if it is just a warm fuzzy feeling.
• People naturally fear change.
• The fear of change is reduced by giving only to people who are like you (or act within your expectations).
• Law structures how we give and reduces the risk with giving.
• The entire process, and especially the idea of law as an institution governing our relationships, is in a process of feedback with our individual acts.

Now I don’t want to get into to much of the theory, but I was thinking about this as illuminating to the psychology of FTAs — specifically about the idea of only transacting business (giving) with those whom you understand (i.e. are like you). This seems to me to have some relationship with Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), which is the key goal for many developing countries when they decide to sign an FTA. (more…)

Selected news and sites from today’s research:

The International Economic Law and Policy Blog notes that more than just the threat of a WTO dispute can affect domestic farm subsidies — the cost of the Iraq war will hurt the budget for US agriculture spending.

Speaking of domestic farm subsidies, Ben Muse has a post on the EU / US trade deal involving capping these subsidies. It looks like this deal could revive the Doha Round.

Both of these posts, for me, reinforce the need to look at the circumstances of these agreements holistically, as many forces come into play when negotiating these agreements.

And in regional political news, bilaterals.org has a copy of an AP story ‘Unification remains elusive at Mercosur‘ discussing last week’s two-day Mercosur summit. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales were both there advocating a reformation of Mercosur to focus in on areas other than free trade.

The Chavez / Morales agenda is the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA in Spanish). This is an agreement put forth as an alternative to FTAs, and emphasizes social policy rather than ‘free trade’.

For more links, you might want to see this ZNet story, the ALBA wikipedia entry, and this piece from venezuelanalysis.com.

(via bilaterals.org) The draft treaty language of the proposed Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Panama is out as of the 19th of January.

The text is available (in English) on the USTR site.

Bilaterals.org reports that the Spanish version will be out on the Ministerio de Comercio e Industrias website.

This agreement will also naturally be a part of this project. After a very quick scan of the documents, it appears to me that the IPR(pdf) and E-Commerce(pdf) provisions, at least, are either substantially the same or even exactly the same as the provisions in the Domincan Republic – Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR CAFTA).

Perhaps the Panamanian Government got the exact same deal as the DR-CAFTA nations? Comments on the agreement, as well as possible reasons why Panama did not participate in the DR-CAFTA negotiations are very welcome.

In doing some preliminary research (looking for good blogs to add to my feeds), I came across an entry in Jonathan Tasini’s Working Life Blog entitled CAFTA fight lives on from August of 2005. In it, he discusses what he says is ‘the nonsence behind the phrase “free trade”‘. He elaborates:

“free trade” does not exist–it’s a marketing phrase intended to blind people by using two words that few people would find objectionable (everyone likes the idea of trading and who is against something that’s FREE!!!)

This kind of talk reminds me of that other famous ‘free’ — the one in ‘free software’. Stallman’s saying for elaborating that free is ‘free as in free speech, not as in free beer‘.

It also is, as Tasini rightly points out, that part of the politics behind these agreements is the language used — as any politician can tell you. Any geek can as well — there is an entire debate over the terms ‘open source’ versus ‘free software’, with many people (myself included) often compromising with FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

The only other term that I can think of for the agreements (as opposed to the concept generally) is ‘regional trade agreements’, which is the phrase used in the (excellent) new book Regional Trade Agreements and the WTO Legal System edited by Edinburgh academic Lorand Bartels and Federico Ortino (I just got it for this project).

So should this blog be called the ‘regional trade blog’?

One answer is simply that ‘Free Trade Agreement’ is much more popular than the alternative (1 million+ hits versus 58,000 on Google) and therefore is the better in terms of site recognition and accepted use.

Another answer would be that ‘free trade’ is the simply the name of the market concept that is driving these agreements, even if the result is less than the pure concept. ‘Free trade’ is the condition where trade is not restricted by tariff or non-tariff barriers. I’ll be posting more about the concept, and its relationship to IP and IT, in the coming weeks and months.

This post also triggered memories of discussing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in undergraduate anthropology classes. In short, Sapir-Whorf is a hypothesis about how language shapes thought (or vice versa). The idea reinforces the need to be clear and concise in picking words when discussing these issues. I’ll concede that speaking and writing about all the concepts inherent in these agreements as ‘free trade’ may indeed obfuscate the real impact of these agreements.

However, getting to the real impact is exactly what this study is about, and we aim to provide detailed materials about both the big picture issues as well as what these agreements mean to individual businesses on the ground.

As a side note, Adam Smith was, of course, one of the first free trade theorist. His grave is, amaazingly enough, down the street from my office — maybe I’ll have to pay it a visit and reflect on the impact one book can have on the whole world.

Via the International Economic Law and Policy Blog (thanks Abbe!) Simon Lester posts on former USTR Robert Zoellick’s proposal for a new ‘Association of American Free Trade Agreements’ in AAFTA We Hafta?. AAFTA is a proposal for a mega group to take in all the other FTAs and Trade Initiatives in the Americas and consolidate them into one secretariat, possibly in Miami, FL and possibly in conjunction with an academic centre for study.

I certainly don’t feel qualified, at this early stage of the game, to say whether or not AAFTA is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing. However, being a Texan working in the UK, I’ve become more sensitive to the need to point out some culturally relevant bits for others not from the States.

First, AAFTA would (almost certainly) not involve Cuba or Venezuela. US idealogical and political disputes with these two countries, generally over communism (or as Zoellick mentions, ‘the pied pipers of populism‘), would entail their exclusion. Along this same line of thinking, I also wonder about smaller countries/economies, such as Suriname, and how they would fit in to AAFTA.

Second, as you can see from the CNN transcript, the idea of ’surrendering the sovereignty of the United States’ is a BIG political hotbutton in the US, and one that if AAFTA is couched in those terms would cause it (IMO) to be very difficult to pass. This isn’t even to mention the numerous conspiracy theories that get thrown out by a segment of the population whenever the term ‘new world order’ gets used. Of course arguments about surrendering sovereignty are common here in Europe, usually in reference to the EU, but the key difference I see is that it seems like most people here (Europe) are generally for more regional integration (or at least aren’t against the regional integration that they already have).

Third, I wonder if AAFTA would even be possible if Presidential Fast Track Authority is not renewed. This is the authority that allows the president to present a trade bill to Congress and get a yes/no vote (no amendments are allowed) within 90 days. Without this authority, it may be difficult to get AAFTA passed domestically.

As to other thoughts about AAFTA, there is no doubt in my mind that Intellectual Property and IT-business related issues (especially ISP liability and anti-circumvention issues) would be a large part of such an organisation. These issues are central to many of the agreeements that would be component parts of the AAFTA, as well as just being issues that are key to discussions about international trade.

Welcome to our new blog! The focus of this blog is on Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and their impact on Information Technology based businesses. The primary focus for research will be the Dominican Republic – Central American FTA (DR-CAFTA) agreement, a recent FTA signed between several Central American nations, the Dominican Republic, and the United States.

Though DR-CAFTA was chosen to give the project focus, we will refer to several other FTAs, such as the Chile-US FTA and the Australian-US FTA, as well as similar agreements involving the European Union.

Specifically, this project will start by focusing in on issues of intermediary liability (such as for internet service providers) and privacy. This will include comparative study on international treaties covering liability issues, as well as specific pieces of legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the USA.

In addition, these agreements also impact intellectual property law within the parties to the agreement. Changes to IP law can have drastic effect on the legal liability for IT businesses for copyright infringement or violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of these laws. The required changes can also have serious affect on such diverse issues as public health (drug patents), traditional knowledge, human rights, and competition law (anti-trust). These areas will also be included in the study as these areas can indirectly affect IT-based businesses.

This blog, as well as an eventual wiki, form the two primary web-based outputs of this project. In addition, we will producing a report, which will be available for download, and we are considering holding an experts meeting on this issue for Summer 2007.

This project is just one of many by the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh. To learn more about the Centre, please see its homepage or follow the link at the top of the page.