How the TPP Could Damage Digital Freedom

The Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP is a hotly contested agreement. This could prevent future governments from making their own decisions on important issues including how long copyright lasts and how Internet Service providers do business, according to the Fair Deal Coalition. Here is an opinion piece from Stuff:

“Hollywood has already approached New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs to stop Kiwis accessing online content.

Radio NZ reported in July of this year that the Motion Pictures Distributors Association wanted access to the Internal Affairs child pornography filter, so they could block access to copyrighted material.

Should a US organisation with commercial interests control your ability to access websites when you are in New Zealand governed by New Zealand laws?

About 25 years ago the world wide web was invented by Timothy Berners-Lee. Last month in an interview with the Washinton Post, Berners-Lee said that US system is now in danger from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who stand to amass too much power over what was intentionally built as a decentralised network – one where no single actor could dictate outcomes to everyone else.

The TPP would indeed limit the open internet, access to knowledge, economic opportunity and fundamental rights if a number of proposed copyright provisions were agreed to. The TPP should lower trade barriers, not raise them.

New Zealand would be obliged under its free trade agreements with the United States, Singapore and Korea to provide a legal incentive to ISPs to cooperate with rights holders to prevent infringement on their systems and networks – based on their laws, not our own. New Zealander’s right to operate as a sovereign nation is at risk. Policies that won’t even address the root causes of internet piracy. Polices that would remove competition on the internet.”

One must wonder whether no online competition truly does form a free and decentralised democracy. Here is an opinion piece from Stuff refuting the arguments against the TPP. It’s interesting to see how interconnected the Internet has made us all. Although there are benefits, evidently from the TPP, there are complications with piracy and foreign laws.

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