There's a revolution underway. It's digital, but not in the computing sector. I'm referring to the world of genomics, which deals with the data that resides inside all living things: DNA. As most people know, DNA uses four chemical compounds - adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine - to encode various structures, most notably proteins, which are represented by stretches of DNA called genes.
Even the European Commission admits that TAFTA/TTIP is not, primarily, a trade agreeement, because the trade barriers between the EU and the US are already so low that removing them will add little to the EU economy. According to a study [.pdf] put together for the European Commission, the uplift in 2027 would be only 24 billion euros on a GDP that was already 12,900 billion euros in 2012; that compares with the most favourable outcome touted by the report, which is 119 billion euros GDP uplift in 2027. However, that is predicated on massive deregulation - although the European Commission prefers to use the euphemism of "removing non-tariff barriers."
A year ago, I wrote a piece about cloud computing's dark secret: that using it in Europe was probably equivalent to making all your files readily available to the US government. And that was before the Snowden revelations confirmed that this was no mere theoretical possibility. I'm not claiming any amazing prescience here: I certainly had no idea of the scale of what was going on, as I've explained in a series of posts on the NSA spying programme. But I can claim a deep and abiding unease about cloud computing, which is why I never jumped on that particular bandwagon, and have written relatively little about it on this blog.
Last week I wrote about my recent talk on open access in which I pointed out that Linux has become the undisputed leader across huge swathes of computing. One area where that's not true is on the desktop, of course, and I fear it's unlikely to change, because of network effects: while there are lots of people using Windows and Office, and swapping data, it will be very hard to get many of them to switch. So that raises an interesting question: given Linux's success, where does it go next?
During 2013, I've written a few articles about Mozilla's attempt to give users greater control over the cookies placed on their systems, and how the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) tried to paint this as Mozilla "undermining the openness", or "hijacking" the Internet because it dared to stand up for us in this way. That makes this latest revelation from the Snowden treasure-trove of documents, published in the Washington Post, rather important:
Readers with good memories may remember various key fights over the years that were largely about ODF and OOXML. The first round culminated in the extraordinarily shoddy fast-tracking of OOXML through the ISO standards process. Then we had a big battle over open standards in general, which also involved ODF and OOXML, where the UK government performed a dizzying series of U-turns.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at a conference celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Berlin declaration on open access. More formally, the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" is one of three seminal formulations of the open access idea: the other two are the Bethesda Statement (2003) and the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002).
In my last TTIP update, I wrote about a fascinating document that revealed the European Commission's PR strategy for handling TAFTA/TTIP. It was already possible to detect there a growing sense of panic among the Commission - a fear that they were losing control of the "narrative", and that remedial action was needed.
At the start of 2012 I began a series of posts about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement - ACTA. These took the form of updates on how ACTA was developing. I did this because I had a sense of how quickly things were moving, and how complicated the issues were, and I wanted to try to track those as they happened.
To make that easier, Computerworld UK brought those updates together on a single page. It turned out to be an extremely exciting ride as opposition to ACTA grew across Europe, culminating in the rejection by the European Parliament on 4 July last year.
However, one thing we have learned is that those behind unbalanced laws like SOPA and treaties like ACTA, never give up. If they fail with one, they just try again with another. And so it turns out in the wake of ACTA's demise. We are now witnessing exactly the same secretive approach being applied to TTIP - the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership - originally known as TAFTA, the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement.
Although TTIP only began a few months ago, it is becoming increasingly controversial as more people begin to realise what is at stake. As I explain in several updates below, one of the key problems is the presence of "investor-state dispute settlement" - ISDS - which I predict will prove to be the most contentious part of TTIP.
Indeed, I think it is likely that ISDS will generate so much resistance among the European public that ultimately it will be removed from TTIP completely in order to give other parts more chance of being passed by the European Parliament, which must approve the agreement once it has been negotiated. What follows is my attempt to track the twists and turns of the journey to that final, fateful vote.
A theme that has re-appeared on this blog many times over the years is that of software patents. As I've noted before, they are perhaps the biggest single threat to free software, especially since the decline of Microsoft. Indeed, it's not hard to see software patent lawsuits being filed by Microsoft in the last, desperate stage of that decline in order to inflict the maximum damage on open source.
In my previous TTIP update, I reported on an extremely important leak about the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), which is the other half of the US attempt to stitch up world trade through supranational treaties.
I've always been a big fan of Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird, even when it was unfashionable to admit it. Because, for the last few years, the view amongst those "in the know" was that email was dead, that nobody used it, and that even if they did, Web-based systems like Gmail meant that Thunderbird and its ilk were dinosaurs.
A few weeks back, I wrote about the troubling prospect of DRM being baked into HTML5. At the centre of a related piece was a post by Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering for Mozilla. As I noted then, it was somewhat opaque, in that I found it hard to understand how exactly Mozilla intended to react to the W3C's pernicious proposal to discuss DRM - specifically, the idea of adding Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5. By a happy chance, Eich was passing through London recently, and so I was able to find out more about Mozilla's attitude and plans in this area.
Today's update is a little odd, since it's not actually about TAFTA/TTIP, at least not directly. Although the second round is taking place this week, it's almost certain we'll be told nothing about the real substance of the discussions. That's because even though these massive trade agreements affect hundreds of millions of people, the latter are not given any opportunity to see the draft texts as they are discussed, or to have any meaningful dialogue with the negotiators. That may have been acceptable 30 years ago, but in the age of the Internet, when it is trivial to make documents available, and easy to enter into online discussions, it's outrageous.
One of the key issues during the ACTA negotiations was transparency - or rather the lack of it. Despite a few token gestures from the European Commission initially, TAFTA/TTIP looks like it will be just as bad. Here's a rather cheap trick the negotiators have just played:
You may recall back in 2011, there was an extraordinary bidding war for the patents of Nortel Networks:
As you may recall, back in September the European Commission finally came out with its proposals for net neutrality, part of its larger "Connected Continent" package designed to complete the telecoms single market. I learned yesterday that the European committee responsible for this area, ITRE (Industry, Research and Energy), has launched something of a stealth consultation on these proposals. Stealth, because neither I nor anyone else that I know covering this area, was aware of them, which is pretty bizarre.
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