TISA: Yet Another Leaked Treaty You’ve Never Heard Of Makes Secret Rules for the Internet

Say hello to TISA, another trade agreement that makes secret rules for the Internet. Article by EFF A February 2015 draft of the secret Trade In Services Agreement (TISA) was leaked again last week, revealing a more extensive and more recent text than that of portions from an April 2014 leak that we covered last year. Together with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), TISA completes a trifecta of trade agreements that the administration could sign under Fast Track without full congressional oversight.

Say hello to TISA, another trade agreement that makes secret rules for the Internet.

Article by EFF

A February 2015 draft of the secret Trade In Services Agreement (TISA) was leaked again last week, revealing a more extensive and more recent text than that of portions from an April 2014 leak that we covered last year. Together with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), TISA completes a trifecta of trade agreements that the administration could sign under Fast Track without full congressional oversight.

Although it is the least well-known of those agreements, it is the broadest in terms of membership. As far as we know, it presently includes twenty countries plus Europe (but notably excluding the major emerging world economies of the BRICS bloc), who, with disdainful levity, have adopted the mantle “the Really Good Friends of Services”. Like its sister agreements, TISA will enact global rules that impact the Internet, bypassing the transparency and accountability of national parliaments. The only difference is that its focus is on services, not goods.

In our previous analysis, we focused our attention on two points from the leaked text. The first was a provision that would prohibit democratically-elected parliaments from enacting limits on the "free flow of information" to protect the privacy of their citizens—limits that, we argued, should be debated publicly, not behind closed doors. The second was text on net neutrality, that would lock in a particular set of global rules on net neutrality, including an open-ended exception for “reasonable network management” that could become a loophole for exploitation. Those provisions remain in the new leaked draft.

But the latest leak has revealed more. The agreement would also prohibit countries from enacting free and open source software mandates. Although “software used for critical infrastructure” is already carved out from this prohibition (and so is software that is not “mass market software”, whatever that means), there are other circumstances in which a country might legitimately require suppliers to disclose their source code.

- Read more at EFF