European civil rights organization warns of content leaked TTIP treaty
The European digital civil rights organization EDRi warns that certain parts of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, pose a threat to citizens’ rights. Part of the provisional text of the treaty was leaked Monday.
EDRi indicates that it has analyzed two of the sixteen leaked documents, namely the part on telecommunications and an overview document. The first document would show that telecom regulators are given too much power. This is because it states that these supervisors are not required to apply certain market regulations to services that are described as public telecommunications services. For example, according to the current text in the document, this would apply to cases where regulation is not necessary to protect consumers or combat discriminatory practices.
In addition, according to the text, a supervisor would be allowed to regularly evaluate market regulation and in certain cases be allowed to change or completely undo it. Another tricky point in the chapter on telecommunications is the fact that the parties to the treaty agree to guarantee the confidentiality of electronic communications, as long as this does not result in a restriction on trade in services. In addition, EDRi raises the question whether, for example, a privacy law could constitute such a restriction. The document also refers to regulations, of which no definition has been given. EDRi interprets this term as ‘laws’, in this piece the interpretation of ‘regulation’ has been adhered to.
The overview document is worrying, according to EDRi, because no progress has been made in the negotiations on the topic of data flows. The civil rights organization suspects that this has to do with the negotiations that are taking place about the Privacy Shield agreement. The document shows that US telecom companies are “very interested” in data flows. Encryption is also a topic in the TTIP negotiations, but no progress has been made there either. The discussion on this topic is based on the text of the TPP, a free trade agreement negotiated between the US, Australia and New Zealand, among others.
Not much is known about the subject of intellectual property protection either, as the US does not want to present proposals on sensitive topics, including technical protection measures, enforcement or digital rights management. According to EDRi, those proposals are about ways of enforcing intellectual property rights by private parties, which could lead to arbitrary decisions by companies.
Commenting on the leaked texts, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström said the documents were ongoing negotiations and not established facts. She emphasizes that ‘no trade agreement will lower EU standards for consumer protection, food safety or the environment’.
The TTIP Treaty is a comprehensive trade agreement between the EU and the US that has been in the works since 2013. The negotiations are not transparent, which leads to a lot of criticism. On Monday, about 250 pages of the text leaked through Greenpeace, which is about half the total volume.