The newest leak on the TISA trade agreement once again confirms the danger that free trade agreements pose to our democracy. Like ACTA, CETA and TTIP before it, TISA demonstrates that these intransparently negotiated treaties are driven by the interests of multinational corporations and risk undermining the efforts of the European Parliament to ensure consumer protection, data protection, net neutrality etc.
The US proposal now made public would undermine European data protection regulations. The EU would be rendered unable to enforce European standards on service providers from the signatory states thanks to clauses allowing the transfer of personal data and freeing companies from any requirements to establish local registered offices.
No Party may prevent a service supplier of another Party from transferring, accessing, processing or storing information, including personal information, within or outside the Party’s territory, where such activity is carried out in connection with the conduct of the service supplier’s business.
The proposal would also contradict the European Parliament’s net neutrality position, which does not allow exceptions from that principle to be justified by commercial interests. The wording allowing restrictions for “reasonable management of the network” is far too vague to effectively prevent the establishment of a commercial fast lane on the internet.
Local consumers should be able to:
-access any services and applications on the Internet, subject to reasonable management of the network …
The TISA agreement aims to fully open the European services market to international corporations while lacking any assurances against the deterioration of public services and consumer protection.
US strategy appears to be to successively expand the scope of such trade agreements. The leaked document continues the approach seen in CETA to no longer specifically list what an agreement covers but instead provide only a limited number of exceptions. This approach would further restrict the democratic freedoms of the European Parliament and national governments.
The rights of the people in Europe are non-negotiable!
CETA, TTIP and TISA must be rejected, like ACTA was.
To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.
Hi everybody,
I like to call for your support for one of the activists behind this release: Pedro Noeal is an activist working in the field of whistleblowing and citizen journalism currently based in Ecuador. Pedro needs your support to affort the travelcosts to attend 31C3 in Hamburg this year. Please find all the details including a record of the publications involving him: http://www.gofundme.com/31c3pedro
best regards
Jens
Given that most things in the virtual world can hardly be made subject to arbitrary boarders, let alone the borders in Europe, don’t you think that this is actually common sense?
Are organisations/services that can pose a serious thread to peoples well-being subject to this agreement?
As much as I like the sentiment, I would hope you let the first one pass, anything else would cause 2 substantial issues.
1. Introduction of infrastructure that verifies whether the data belongs to something or somebody that is “people in Europe” as you phrase it.
2. Makes trust-less architecture impossible in a commercial setting. Your record on the blockchain is literally stored everywhere whether it contains payment or personal information is irrelevant.
Both points seem to me way more important than some better refined targeted advertisement for facebooks european inventory that we may prevent.