The Atlantic Council hosted Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Director-General Dame Carolyn Fairbairn in Washington, D.C. on February 5, 2020 for a discussion about the UK’s global trading future post-Brexit. Dame Carolyn was supportive of the UK pursuing a new free trade agreement with the US that would include new standards for tech including ecommerce, fin-tech, and artificial intelligence (AI). She suggested that the OECD AI Principles would be a good place to start with respect to operationalizing high AI standards in a U.S.-UK trade deal. There is a lot to be said for this approach, particularly in making Principle 2.5 c) a reality: c): “Governments should promote the development of multi-stakeholder, consensus-driven global technical standards for interoperable and trustworthy AI.” This also makes sense because neither the United States nor the United Kingdom are likely going to want to do away with the idea that market access commitments in trade agreeme ...

Last week on December 1, SIIA partnered with George Washington University and the Centre for International Governance Innovation to take “A Fresh Look at Digital Trade in North America.” The livestream can be accessed by anybody who has a Facebook account and is available here.  Pictures from the event can be found here on the Institute for International Economics Facebook page.  There is also Politico reporting from the discussion.  The NAFTA renegotiation is a top SIIA goal and the Association’s priorities can be found in this testimony.    

This year’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) USA, held here in Washington, D.C.  at George Washington University (GWU), is a truly multifaceted meeting, which will inform the global IGF meeting in December in Joao Pessoa, Brazil.   Take a look at the program.  There are no holy cows.  There is even one panel which asks the question: “Can the Internet Cause Too Much Disruption?”

“I fully agree with that,” was the response by Antonio de Lecea, Minister of the EU Delegation to the United States.  IBM’s Steve Stewart had just expressed the view that an EU –US trade agreement resulting from the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would be an effective place to create a good template for binding rules on cross border data flows.

I will be testifying today before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in a hearing on digital trade, and I plan to urge the ITC to cultivate the digital economy by lowering barriers to trade in digital services and prioritizing intellectual property protection and enforcement.