#193: NAFTA, Tech, and Trade

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2017

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The North American Free Trade Agreement was a major sticking point in the 2016 election, with then-candidate Trump criticizing the trade deal for killing U.S. jobs, particularly in manufacturing. But how do policies like NAFTA impact technology and the everyday consumer experience? Recently, Canada, Mexico, and the United States began renegotiating the 1994 trade agreement, aiming to complete a new deal by the end of the year. Should tech stakeholders be worried about changes to NAFTA, or is this an opportunity for improving a deal that was struck long before most Americans had ever used the Internet? What will it mean for cybersecurity, intellectual property, tariffs, and other tech issues? Evan is joined by Ed Brzytwa, Director of Global Policy for the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI). For more, see ITI’s comments on NAFTA modernization.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the tech policy podcast. I'm a sports tropper. On today's show, tech, trade, and
0:07.9	NAFTA. As President Trump looks to renegotiate the North American free trade agreement,
0:13.3	what does it mean for technology? How has this 25-year-old agreement helped or hurt technology up
0:18.9	until now? And what sorts of considerations are going into the renegotiation,
0:23.2	and what is the tech industry looking to get out of a rethinking of NAFTA?
0:27.2	Joining me to discuss this is Edward Bristwa, Director of Global Policy for ITI.
0:32.0	That's the Information Technology Industry Council.
0:34.8	Ed, thanks for joining the show.
0:36.3	Thanks very much, Evan.
0:37.3	So, Ed, for listeners who are not familiar with ITI, what do you guys do?
0:42.2	ITI, well, we're an advocacy association.
0:46.0	We represent 60 of the biggest and most innovative technology companies in the world.
0:50.9	We advocate on behalf for our members on really critical issues to them. So trade policy
0:56.4	is one of those issues. I would say cybersecurity, privacy, standards, regulatory compliance. It's a
1:04.7	pretty long list of things that we care about, the ITI on behalf of our members. Just to give you a couple of examples of who our members are, I think it's a lot of the big
1:14.0	names you've heard of.
1:15.0	So Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, IBM, pretty long list.
1:22.3	Yeah.
1:22.6	And it's people who make software, people who make equipment.
1:25.1	It's fairly broad.
1:26.0	So your colleague, Ashley Friedman,
1:30.0	testified recently about NAFTA. And one of the things she said that was interesting is that
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