Digital trade negotiations should not allow “big tech” to influence the creation of new rules or allow technology companies to operate with insufficient labor standards, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said last week.

Khanna, who serves on the House Armed Services cyber, innovative technologies and information systems subcommittee, spoke during a virtual town hall event run by the American Economic Liberties Project, an advocacy group focused on corporate accountability. The goal was to discuss big tech companies’ use of digital trade demands to influence trade agreements and implement rules that favor corporations, according to the organizers.

Lori Wallach, the director of the organization’s Rethink Trade project, said in an introduction at the Thursday event that big tech companies are fighting against regulation efforts by employing a strategy that has been “branded digital trade.” The companies are trying to “hijack international negotiations” by labelling them as “trade negotiations and impose binding international rules and effectively handcuff government … so that the governments cannot actually implement rules that can limit the digital firms’ powers and/or make them follow things like the basic labor laws.”

Wallach singled out the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, launched by the Biden administration earlier this year, as a key concern. The framework includes four pillars, one focused on trade and including a digital trade component.

“In the context of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and other trade negotiations, the big tech interests have been very clear [on] what they want, and what they want provides no value to workers, to consumers [or] to other businesses,” Wallach said.

The U.S.-led framework’s digital trade element provides an opportunity for big tech companies to “use their monopoly power and their lobbyists to try and rig the rules,” she added.

Wallach asked Khanna if most members of Congress are aware of what she called a backdoor “sneak attack” and whether lawmakers would realize if big tech “hijacks” the digital trade element in IPEF.

“We have to realize that stakes in some of these trade agreements are just like the mistakes that were made in previous trade agreements, that if you put in and lock in standards that aren’t supportive of worker rights, that aren’t supportive of a worker privacy, that allows the monitoring of workers, then that’s a big problem,” Khanna said.

Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said during the same event that big tech companies must be kept out of the decision-making in trade negotiations to ensure that workers are not being mistreated.

He also argued for “policies that have strict enforcement and penalties so that we can protect, preserve and improve working conditions not only for people in the States but on a global level.”

Khanna concurred. “We don’t want digital firms to be able to go forum-shopping around the world for the lowest labor standards,” he said. “We don’t want them to go forum-shopping around the world for the lowest privacy standards. We don’t want them to go forum-shopping around the world for the lowest standard when it comes to antitrust enforcement.”

“And so all we’re saying is ‘Let’s learn the mistakes of being too deferential to a free-market absolutism that has left us in a situation of a lack of factories, lack of jobs, destroyed communities, and not replicate that when it comes to the digital economy,’” he continued.

Khanna added “It’s so important that we do not give backdoors, but it’s also so important that we pass legislation in the United States on patent privacy, on antitrust, and we strengthen the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] and the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] and the enforcement agencies of our government.”

Some IPEF members have identified digital trade as a potential area for an “early harvest,” but U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai last month called talk of early accords premature.

Wallach in September told Inside U.S. Trade that USTR should not recycle digital provisions from previous U.S. agreements.

“If IPEF reuses the previous model of digital trade provisions, it will be strongly anti-worker-centric, as those past agreements are entirely rigged by big tech solely for the purpose of evading government oversight to stop their abuses of workers, consumers, and competing businesses,” she said then.