Lori Wallach and Daniel Rangel at Rethink Trade cast the digital trade talks in a more sinister light in the comments they filed with USTR.

They accused Big Tech companies of trying to use the IPEF negotiations “to lock in binding international rules that limit governments from regulating digital firms’ behavior in the public interest and from fighting corporate concentration and monopoly power.”

“If this ‘digital trade’ ploy succeeds, Big Tech interests could weaken existing policies worldwide and stop U.S. policies that constrain digital entities’ monopolistic abuses and anticompetitive power, that protect privacy and individual rights over personal and non-personal data, that fight algorithm discrimination, that hold platforms liable for dangerous products and violent incitement and that protect gig workers’ labor rights,” they wrote.

180 degree turn sought: “USTR’s objectives for IPEF negotiations must be the opposite of past ‘digital trade talks’” by allowing countries to maintain “full policy space for digital standards that protect workers, consumers, small businesses and civil rights,” the Rethink team wrote.

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