This month negotiators from 11 countries are gathering in Singapore for an important round of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement. As it happens, Singapore provides the perfect backdrop for understanding the opportunity countries have to expand trade in digital services. Singapore has vaulted into the tier of countries with the best … Read More >>
Tag: trade
A New Trade Agreement for a New Era of Digital Services
Last week US Trade Representative Ron Kirk announced the Administration’s intention to start talks on an International Services Agreement (ISA) with Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and more than a dozen other trading partners. This is an ambitious undertaking, and it holds the potential to break wide open a services market of … Read More >>
Four Trends to Watch in 2013
There have been a number of important inflection points in the growth and maturation of the global software industry — the extension of copyright law to cover machine-readable code, the birth of the PC, the commercialization of the Internet, and the advent of cloud computing, to name a few. As we enter 2013, the industry … Read More >>
A Catalogue of Worry for US IT Companies
Every year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative issues a National Trade Estimate. It serves as a comprehensive catalogue of the market barriers American companies face around the world. In a public filing this week, BSA has recommended that a slew of alarming, IT-focused barriers be added to the list.
TPP: The First Regional Trade Agreement of the Cloud Era
Trade officials from the United States and eight other Pacific Rim countries are meeting this week in Leesburg, Va., for the 14th negotiating round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an agreement noteworthy for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that it constitutes the first one of its kind in the cloud computing … Read More >>