How Multilateral Free Trade Agreements Are Bypassing Democratic Decision-Making Around The World

One of the most worrying aspects of ACTA -- which began life as a "simple" treaty about combatting counterfeit goods -- was how it morphed into a new approach to global policy making. This had two key aspects. First, the treaty would be negotiated in secret, with minimal input from the public, but plenty from lobbyists, who were given access to key documents and to negotiators. Secondly, the results of those secret negotiations were designed to constrain the participating governments in important ways that nullified ordinary democratic decision-making. If at all, representative bodies were presented with a take-it-or-leave it choice; changing individual details was not an option.

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Public Well-Being Must Be 'Primary Measurement' Of US-EU Trade Agreement

Now that the US and EU have officially announced the start of talks on a new bilateral free trade agreement -- sorry, a "trade and investment partnership" -- groups in both regions are trying to work out what this will mean for them and their constituents. Arguably the most important constituency of all is the public, and yet it is also the one that until now has been systematically shut out of previous negotiations for things like ACTA or TPP. One representative of that huge group -- though not, obviously, the only one -- is the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), which describes itself as follows: 

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Spreading the Intellectual Monopoly Madness

How mad is this?

Advanced European countries are increasingly looking for channels to school their neighbours and worldwide free-trade agreement partners on the enforcement of western-style intellectual property rights.

And how bad is the premise:

The basic underlying assumption of the meeting was that a stronger intellectual property system is beneficial, and that UNECE members have knowledge and ideas to patent and protect. A source characterised the view as: A well-designed intellectual property regime increases national wealth and benefits consumers by stimulating research and investment into new technologies and innovative products, and by enabling the transfer of technology, including between countries at different stages of economic development.

Well, no, actually. As history shows, intellectual monopolies do nothing to increase national wealth overall: they just make the holders of the monopolies richer. Society as a whole loses out. Spreading this kind of misinformation is downright immoral.

Exporting Jurisdictions - the Other Way

We're used to seeing the US exporting its own ideas of what consitututes illegality when it comes to copyright and patents - notably through its free trade agreements - but here's a useful reminder that in today's interconnected world, things can flow the other way too:

As Second Life grows, the European market becomes a larger and larger part of its user base. ComScore estimates as a much as 61% of Second Life's residents are based in Europe (including 16% in Germany). While ComScore's likely overestimated the number of active European residents, there is no doubt that European users have made up a substantial percentage of Second Life's rapid growth over the last eighteen months. Enough growth, that Linden Lab is rumored to be looking for European collocation space. And with servers in Europe, the Second Life content on those servers would unequivocally fall under the laws of the nation(s) those servers are based in.

And since you cannot usefully carve up the metaverse based on the physical geography of its users, this means that European laws - notably on virtual child pornography - are likely to be applied to the whole of Second Life.

Not so Corny for the Mexicans

By embracing the NAFTA treaty, Mexico surrendered its corn output to the vagaries of the North American corn market. Now, all of a sudden, Americans want corn, lots of it. As part of a dubious strategy to make “cleaner” gasoline while rewarding Big Agriculture and farm states, the U.S. Government is shoveling huge subsidies to corn-based ethanol production. This new demand has bid up prices in the U.S. and caused acute corn shortages in Mexico, which in turn has tripled and quadrupled the price of tortillas.

Which just goes to show that "free" trade is neither free as in freedom nor free as in beer.