[governance] E-commerce negotiations expected to be launched at Davos - Statement against

[parminder]

Hi All

Wishing you all a great 2019!

It is expected that plurilateral negotiations on e-commerce will be
launched at the World Economic Forum's Davos annual meeting last week of
Jan 2019, bypassing the WTO. The African groupandIndia had blocked
attempts at launching ecom negotiations at the WTO Buenos Aires
ministerial in Dec 2017 ... We have prepared the enclosed and below
statement for sign ons. It highlights what is contained in the proposed
rules, what are the proponents' true motives, why some developing
countries get deceived, and why these rules should be stopped.

Pl follow the instructions on the statement for endorsement...An email
to be me would work as well....

best, parminder


*Statement de**veloped by *_*Just Net Coalition*
<https://justnetcoalition.org/>_


*E-commerce negotiations being launched at the WEF *

*are really about rules for digital colonisation*


*A call to the people and governments of the world to oppose
legitimisation of*

*the new land grab of people’s, communities’, and nations’ data *


World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Davos meeting in January, 2019, is expected
to witness the launch of plurilateral negotiations on global e-commerce
rules, bypassing the WTO. Dominant digital interests – global digital
business and governments supporting it – plan the proposed rules to be a
blue-print for a whole new global digital order.


*A new digital social contract*

Agrarian-feudal economic and social relationships centred on land
ownership, and industrial age ones on ownership of industrial and later
intellectual capital. In the digital age, these relationships will
revolve around ownership of data and the resultant artificial
intelligence.^^1 The proposed e-commerce rules^^2 mandate unrestrained
global flow of data – the primary resource of the digital society. This
in essence means that data will be the property of whoever collects and
hoards it. It provides an, in perpetuity, legitimacy to global data
land-grabs by a few digital corporations such as Facebook, Google,
Amazon, Alibaba, etc.


These rules would insulate global digital corporations from national
regulation by disallowing any requirement for their ‘local presence’ in
the domestic territory, and inspection of their software and algorithms.
Digital inter-connections, payments, authentication, cyber-security,
etc, get mostly subject to global private law – under pro- big business
arbitration – further curtailing the remit of domestic jurisdictions
over global digital interactions. Prohibition against any
border-crossing tax on commercial digital transactions would, in turn,
debilitate the nation state’s finances in the digital era.


Digital economy is not just a sector. It pervades and increasingly
transforms all sectors – like the industrial society/economy paradigm
did before it. As every sector and activity becomes digital, and infused
with artificial intelligence, this proposed political economy and
private governance framework for the digital will dominate all aspects
of societies. It will increasingly upend the social contract that
underlies the nation-state based mixed economy and welfarism for the
last many decades.


Digital opportunities, many believe, can bring unprecedented prosperity
for all. But for this, digital governance must be based on principles of
social justice and equity within and across societies. This is required
even more in this formative period of the digital society. Quite the
opposite is sought, however, through rules for global usurpation of the
most valuable digital resource, and hamstringing national regulation. A
few powerful businesses and governments plan to digitally control all
social activities and economic sectors across the world. The omnipresent
tentacles of the Internet, globally extracting granular data about every
person and thing, underpin these new controls.


*The e-commerce chimera*

The biggest bluff of global e-commerce rules is how they get sold in the
name of helping micro, small and medium enterprises in developing
countries. So apparently, the new messiahs of small enterprises in
developing countries are going to be a few US based global digital
corporations, that _monopolise e-commerce
<https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=5785&context=ylj>_to
_take up to 40 percent commissions
<https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/business-of-brands/fashion-e-tailers-shell-out-30-40-margin-to-e-commerce-platforms/49057016>_,
_abuse sellers’ and manufacturers’ data
<https://www.seattletimes.com/business/eu-investigates-amazons-collection-of-data-on-marketplace-rivals/>_to
manipulate them and/or replace their products by in-house ones, are
_most arbitrary and exploitative
<https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/29/amazon-investigated-by-the-german-antitrust-authority.html>_in
their relationships with sellers/producers, and beyond national
regulations to impose any fairness on their activities!


Some developing country leaders get led to believe that global
e-commerce simply represents a great expansion of the marketplace,
opening more market opportunities for their struggling businesses. For
one, expanded and more open markets are not necessarily better for their
small businesses, an overwhelming majority of which deal in goods that
are easily out-priced by global mass manufacturing centres like in
China. The latter can now so much more readily penetrate even the
remotest local markets. These leaders that are enthusiastic about global
e-commerce perhaps need to first list the actual goods that their
domestic businesses produce in a globally competitive manner! Artisan
and other cultural goods tend to form the staple of the ‘global
e-commerce for development’ rhetoric, but they constitute an extremely
small part of any economy.


Digitalisation can enhance efficiencies in every economic activity and
layer of the economy. It is NOT digital efficiencies in the global trade
layer that will bring the most immediate benefits to developing
countries. It will simply expose their vulnerable economies and markets
to endless exploitation. Developing countries need to first digitalise
their domestic production processes, to produce globally valuable
products cheaply. They must focus on developing domestic digital
platforms. In short, they need to undertake digital industrialisation
before they can benefit from global digital trade. To the extent that
trade across borders also can stimulate industrialisation, and scale
being important for the digital economy, _developing countries should
first collaborate
<https://unctad.org/en/pages/PublicationWebflyer.aspx?publicationid=2099>_among
those with comparable digital development.


The founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, Jack Ma, himself considers
_e-commerce to be an outdated concept
<https://www.cw.com.hk/cloud/alibaba-s-jack-ma-e-commerce-will-vanish-soon>_.
This clearly underlines the fallacy of seeing e-commerce primarily as
digitally-expanded marketplaces. What global digital platforms really do
is to re-organise every sector employing data-based digital
intelligence, and then control them in a monopolistic manner. Such
controls tend to be very one-sided and highly exploitative, with deep
lock-ins. This situation demands new kinds of digital regulation, and
national frameworks mandating local ownership of data for nurturing
domestic digital businesses. The proposed e-commerce rules pre-empt all
such possibilities, which shows how their proponents know their game
well into the future.


Developing countries cannot simply hope that the benefits of their local
producers getting new markets through global e-commerce will somehow
outweigh the disadvantages of cheap products from mass manufacturing
centres inundating their domestic markets. They would be equally
misplaced to expect that global e-commerce rules will help the
flourishing of their domestic digital platforms, where they already
exist. The latter face quick annihilation as soon as global digital
majors cast their eyes on the corresponding markets. India, which has
been a little ahead of the curve among developing countries (other than
China), has already seen its _major digital platform companies unionise
<https://qz.com/india/1115030/indiatech-org-from-flipkarts-sachin-bansal-to-ola-indias-homegrown-internet-startups-are-ganging-up-against-foreign-rivals/>_and
seek government protection against global _‘capital dumping’
<https://www.livemint.com/Companies/zvwvmpnpkOnUrXFXGpK88M/Flipkarts-Sachin-Bansal-cites-selective-globalisation-seek.html>_.



A reality check is needed for the chimera of ‘global e-commerce for
development’ created by digital superpowers, with the support of some
donor and international agencies.


*Resist digital colonialism*

Global business leaders from the South – like _Bob van Dijk, CEO of
Naspers
<https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/india-should-never-be-a-digital-colony-like-europe-naspers-ceo-bob-van-dijk/articleshow/63074511.cms>_,
Africa’s biggest company; _Anil Ambani, head of India’s largest business
house
<https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/mukesh-ambani-says-data-colonisation-as-bad-as-physical-colonisation/articleshow/67164810.cms>__;_and
_Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of India’s top IT company
<https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/nilekani-voices-concern-over-data-colonisation-by-global-tech-giants/article9807722.ece>_–
have been warning against data and digital colonisation. Traders’ groups
in many developing countries are holding protests, and local digital
businesses are complaining, as they face being captured or wiped out by
global digital corporations.


Some developing country leaders, however, remain blinded by the lure of
sitting at the high table with global digital business leaders, this
time at the snow-white Davos. They keep hoping that these business
leaders will somehow magically usher in the appropriate digital economy/
society in their countries.


It would be useful to understand the future that dominant digital
interests have in mind through the proposed e-commerce rules. Data flows
unchecked from all countries to a very few global digital corporations,
mostly in the US and some in China. Such expansive and minute data
enables them to develop thorough real time digital intelligence about
every sector and every single economic activity and actor. It would be
as if the ‘brains’ of all physical activities and processes in all other
countries are ‘outsourced’ to these few corporations. A complete
cognitive lock-in and digital intelligence dependency soon sets the
conditions for total economic and social domination. As it gets
entrenched, future options for developing countries to ever extricate
themselves also get foreclosed. In any case, as explained earlier, the
proposed rules simultaneously de-fang key levers of national digital
regulation, render digital relationships subject to global private law,
and considerably squeeze the taxation base of the state.


The choice of the Mecca of global business, WEF, for launching this
potent new framework for domination of the world by a few digital
corporations indeed rings of poetic appropriateness!


We, the undersigned, call upon the people and the governments of the
world to oppose this blatant attempt at a new elitist digital social
contract which is nothing but one between the digital masters and the
rest of us, laying out the rules of our digital servitude for all times
to come.


Let us claim our data, and our digital future, for ourselves!


Just Net Coalition

…………………….

…………………….

…………………….



/This statement is open for endorsements by organisations and
individuals till January 15/^/th/ /, 2019. Please send your endorsement,
or any questions, to /_/secretariat at justnetcoalition.org/
<mailto:secretariat at justnetcoalition.org>_/. Alternatively, you can
endorse it online at /_/https://data.justnetcoalition.org/
<https://data.justnetcoalition.org/>_/. /



1Among others, the prominent author and public intellectual Yuval Harari
_recently employed
<https://bdtechtalks.com/2018/01/31/yuval-harari-wef-ai-big-data-digital-dictatorship/>_the
analogy across land, capital and data ownership.

2First developed as a part of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade
treaty, its template of e-commerce rules has been repeated at all trade
discussions that US and its allies get involved in, including at the WTO.

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