ALI Webinar: Discussion with Congresswoman Suzan DelBene (D-WA): The Future of Digital Policy
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ALI and WITA co-hosted a webinar with Congresswoman Suzan DelBene (D-WA), a member of the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee and a thought leader on technology and digital policy. The conversation focused on the importance of the U.S. to lead on setting up a domestic and international digital regulatory regime, one that will ensure an internet that is secure, transparent, and open for business.
Privacy: A federal policy on data privacy is urgently needed. It is not a partisan issue, but lawmakers do need to be educated on the urgency and importance of this issue. California has recently enacted its own privacy standard, and DelBene expects that other states will move forward with their own privacy standards if there continues to be no federal response. A federal privacy standard is also critical to enable the U.S. to have a strong position from which to negotiate with the EU and other countries with different privacy standards.
WTO E-Commerce negotiations: The WTO e-commerce talks have been moving forward, but the negotiations have been difficult given the large number of countries involved and the low-level of ambition for many of the countries. The U.S. needs to take the lead on a negotiating a high-standards agreement and lead the way on developing those standards.
China: China is subsidizing their digital equipment, especially in Africa, and when they sell equipment, they sell countries their regulatory regime, including censorship and a lack of transparency. China is selling systems which will allow other countries to monitor their citizens in the same way China monitors its own citizens, making these sales a humanitarian as well as a commercial issue. The U.S. needs its own 5G capacity and supply chains, so it is not reliant on China. ALI has advocated the concept of a digital Marshall Fund, with the U.S. providing funding to support the sale of U.S. equipment.
The U.S. needs to balance the legitimate national security concerns regarding Chinese technology sales with the need to collaborate with China in the technology sector, and the understanding that we cannot decouple. Once again, the U.S. must take the lead on setting standards domestically and then work collaboratively to make these global standards. The U.S. should start now to develop standards for new technologies like facial recognition and AI.
Digital Service Taxes: The U.S. has not fundamentally thought of tax policy from a digital perspective. Every type of industry is been impacted by digital service taxes. Numerous countries have unilaterally enacted digital service taxes (DSTs) and the U.S. is negotiating bilaterally with each one, which is suboptimal. The OECD is trying to reach a consensus on how to tax digital activity, and the U.S. should invest in that effort. Ideally that effort would be further along, but the pandemic has slowed it down. Hopefully, the OECD process will yield results by the end of this year.
U.S.-UK Trade Negotiations: The U.S. and the U.K. will have to reach agreement on DSTs. The current UK digital tax is discriminatory. It would be much better if the U.K. would wait for the OECD process to yield results before implementing their digital tax system. In terms of privacy, we will need to resolve the difference in our systems. The UK is currently using the EU’s GDPR privacy standard, and a privacy standard needs to be negotiated. GDPR is becoming an international standard but the U.S. still needs to develop a U.S. federal privacy policy in order to effectively negotiate.
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