Last year, US President Joe Biden's administration upset big tech companies and all those who profit from our personal data by abandoning a proposal that would have violated data privacy, online civil rights and liberties, and antitrust safeguards. Biden's new executive order on the security of Americans' data shows that lobbyists had reason to worry.

For decades, data brokers and technology platforms have used Americans' personal data without any controls or restrictions, but the Biden administration announced that it will ban the transfer of certain types of data to China and other suspicious countries. This is a small but important step in protecting Americans' personal data in addition to government data.

Moreover. the decree is likely to become a precursor to additional political decisions. Americans are justifiably concerned about what happens online, and their concerns are not limited to privacy violations, but extend to a host of other digital harms, such as misinformation and disinformation, social media-induced teenage angst, and incitement to racial hatred.

Companies that make money from our data (including medical, financial, and geographic information) have tried for years to equate the "free flow of data" with freedom of speech. They will try to formulate the protection of public interests by the Biden administration as an attempt to close access to news sites, limit the Internet and strengthen autocracy. That's nonsense.

Tech companies know that if there is an open, democratic debate, consumers' concerns about digital security will far outweigh their concerns about profits. That's why lobbyists tried to bypass the democratic process. One of their methods is to demand vague trade provisions aimed at limiting the steps the United States and other countries can take to protect personal data.

It seems obvious that the President of the United States must protect the privacy and national security of Americans, which may be at risk depending on how and where the vast amounts of data generated by all of us are processed and stored. Yet surprisingly, former President Donald Trump's administration sought to prohibit the US from placing restrictions on the "cross-border transfer of information, including personal data" to any country if such transfer is related to the business of an investor or service provider operating in the US or another signatory country to the agreement.

The Trump administration's proposal to include this rule in the World Trade Organization included one exception that would supposedly allow some regulation to "achieve a necessary and legitimate public policy objective," but it was written in a way that would not work in practice. Lobbyists for big tech companies cite this exception in response to criticism of their big proposal, but the language of the provision is from the WTO's "General Exception," which has failed in 46 out of 48 attempts to apply it.

The ban on cross-border data regulation was one of four proposals that lobbyists for big tech companies convinced Trump officials to include in a revised North American Free Trade Agreement and offer in WTO negotiations. Written in arcane jargon and buried in hundreds of pages of trade agreements, these provisions are misleadingly called "digital trade" rules.

By barring governments from adopting certain policies, the proposed industrial terms threatened bipartisan efforts in the US Congress to combat abuses of consumers, workers and small businesses by technology companies. They also undermined the work of US regulatory agencies responsible for protecting our privacy and civil rights and enforcing antitrust policies. In fact, if Trump-era rules banning government restrictions on data flows were to take effect at the WTO, they would be a roadblock to the Biden administration's new data security policies.

Few were aware that the Trump-era proposal even existed, except, of course, the lobbyists running the trade negotiations by default. While no previous US trade agreement contained provisions that removed the executive branch's and Congress' powers to regulate data, digital platforms would suddenly be granted special privacy rights. The types of algorithmic evaluations and AI prescreenings that Congress and executive agencies consider important to the public 

from the point of view of protecting the interests, would be banned.

After Trump's defeat in the 2020 election, industry lobbyists still hoped to normalize these abnormal rules. They planned to add the same provisions to the Biden administration's deal, called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. But instead of going after the lobbyists, Biden officials, along with Congress, found that the Trump administration's proposals are incompatible with Congressional and administration goals for digital privacy, competition and regulation.

Now we understand why tech lobbyists were so fired up when the Biden administration decided not to back Trump's proposal. They realized that by throwing away the "digital commerce" handcuffs of big tech companies, the Biden administration is reasserting its regulatory authority over big platforms and data brokers that across the political spectrum say have too much power. Trade agreements have a bad reputation because of this very behavior of corporate lobbyists.

There needs to be a serious debate in the US about how best to regulate tech companies and how to preserve competition while preventing the digital damage that fuels political polarization and undermines democracy. Clearly, the debate should not be limited to barriers these companies have secretly inserted into trade agreements. US Trade Representative Catherine Tye is quite right when she says that it would be a "policy mistake" to impose restrictive trade rules on these issues before the US government formulates its own approach.

Regardless of your position on the regulation of big tech companies (whether or not anti-competitive practices and social harms should be curbed), anyone who believes in democracy should applaud the Biden administration for refusing to "put the cart before the horse." The US, like other countries, must democratically decide its digital policy. If that happens, I think the outcome will be far from what these companies and their lobbyists are seeking.

Source: Banks.am