USMCA Formalizes Free Flow of Data, Other Tech Issues

Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2020

By Agam Shah and Jared Council

The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement hands executives and companies more certainty about technology issues, including liability protection and free flow of data across borders, analysts say.

Victoria Espinel, president and CEO of software-industry trade group BSA, said, “This agreement is a big deal for CIOs, and it is entirely different from Nafta,” adding that the internet, cloud computing and artificial intelligence weren’t commercial realities in the early 1990s. “The major technological innovations over the past couple of decades that shape our lives and have such a significant impact on...the jobs that CIOs do—they didn’t exist when Nafta was negotiated.”

USMCA also includes a provision that restricts governments from forcing companies to disclose their underlying source code, such as algorithms that power AI systems. Ms. Espinel of BSA said this provision promotes business predictability and avoids situations where businesses are forced to unveil trade secrets.

“For any company that’s creating software—and as you know that’s not just software companies—knowing that governments won’t be able to force them to disclose the source code for their software is a real benefit,” she said.

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