Digital Trade

There seems to be a lot of experimentation going on these days with exceptions for the protection of personal data/privacy in digital trade agreements/chapters. I've talked about the some of these exceptions in prior posts, but to be honest I think I missed some nuances as

In recent years, the U.S. has expressed concerns about digital trade regulation in a number of other countries, with the focus tending to be on the the EU due to its large market and active regulatory efforts (although it sounds like USTR and the European Commission are getting along

There's a new FTA digital chapter to analyze, with the EU-New Zealand FTA coming into force soon. Let's take a look at the data flows provisions, with the EU-Japan text in the back of our minds as a comparison. The EU-NZ digital trade chapter is here.

I've already made these points for the trade policy crowd, but I have now tried to make my pitch on a way forward for the Biden administration on international digital trade rules slightly more accessible (i.e., without so many blockquotes of international legal texts!). Below are some

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) governments have been working on the issue of international rules on digital trade. There was recently a leak of a draft Digital Trade Protocol to the AfCFTA Agreement (an earlier draft is here). In this post, I'm going to look at

Based on a couple recent meetings I was a part of, I thought it might be helpful to put together some specific proposals for digital trade provisions related to data flow obligations and exceptions, in the context of international economic agreements. The Biden administration appears to be having some internal

I've done several posts on digital trade provisions in which I set out the data flow obligations and the exceptions, and consider whether the drafters have struck a good balance in terms of promoting data flows while preserving regulatory space. A recent draft amendment to the existing EU-Japan

The U.S. made headlines last week by withdrawing some proposals it had previously made on specific aspects of the WTO Joint Statement Initiative on E-commerce negotiations. Many pro-trade people were upset by this decision, but for reasons I will explain below, I wasn't as bothered. My first