It's been a “very important year” for Internet governance and the ITU Plenipotentiary in Busan, South Korea, was the “highlight,” NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said on a panel Thursday hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations and sponsored by Google. All panelists, including Daniel Sepulveda, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, called the ITU conference a success. Sepulveda said cybersecurity issues aren’t in the “remit” of the ITU. The conference emphasized that ITU wouldn’t be inserted into areas of content control, he said. Strickling said ICANN’s accountability proposal process has been “slower” than its corresponding Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition proposal and called the latter process “almost metaphysical.” He said ICANN and NTIA are relying on the ICANN community to develop the proposal (see 1410140062), and they weren’t trying to “steer it in any particular direction.” The debates over Internet governance and cybersecurity issues are far from over, said Christopher Painter, State Department cyber issues coordinator. Countries that are considering “drawing sovereign boundaries around cyberspace” have become much more active in Internet governance debates, he said.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative seeks comment on telecom sections of the World Trade Organization General Agreement on Trade in Services, North American Free Trade Agreement (FTA), Central American Free Trade Agreement and FTAs with Australia, Bahrain, Chile, Colombia, Korea, Morocco, Oman, Panama, Peru and Singapore and all mutual recognition agreements that relate to telecom equipment. Comments are due Dec. 5, and USTR will “conduct” a review by 2015, it said in a Friday Federal Registernotice. USTR prefers comments be submitted via www.regulations.gov, docket number USTR-2014-0022. U.S. trade law requires USTR to ask for comments on telecom agreements. The comments should focus on access to foreign telecom markets for U.S. companies, USTR said.

President Barack Obama is likely to push forward on the Trans-Pacific Partnership at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leader’s Summit, which opened Monday in Beijing, and may also target TPP progress at other meetings with heads of state in the coming days and weeks, said Peterson Institute for International Economics analysts. Immediately after the midterm elections, CEA President Gary Shapiro singled out a CE industry priority -- "fast-track trade authority" to reduce tariffs on high-tech goods -- as one of several legislative initiatives that he thinks will progress rapidly through a Republican-controlled House and Senate (see 1411050022). The Republican landslide in the midterms increases the likelihood that Congress and the White House will be able to cooperate on some critical pieces of the trade agenda over the coming months, said Peterson Institute senior trade analyst Jeff Schott on a Friday call with reporters. Obama and likely next majority leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., pledged the day after the elections to move on trade. Congress is likely to vote on Trade Promotion Authority in the early weeks of 2015, and a TPP implementation vote could come within a year of securing TPA, said Schott.

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman prodded the Chinese government to put more concessions on the table in Information Technology Agreement expansion negotiations, saying such progress would be a “concrete contribution to strengthening the WTO system at a time when such a boost is needed.” The World Trade Organization is dealing with the late July collapse of the Trade Facilitation Agreement. While ITA expansion talks have not yielded any real breakthrough in years of negotiations, supporters of the agreement are eyeing the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which began Friday, as a window for progress (see 1411050010). Speaking at the APEC summit in Beijing Friday, Froman also praised slashed tariffs among APEC members.

The upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing will make for another opportunity for the U.S. and China to make headway in Information Technology Agreement negotiations, said John Neuffer, an Information Technology Industry Council senior vice president and an advocate for ITA expansion. Neuffer said in a Nov. 4 blog post that the two sides should narrow the gaps between negotiating positions following a recent groundswell of industry support for imminent expansion of the ITA, a pact that has not expanded its tariff liberalization since 1996 (see 14092912). ITA supporters, including Neuffer, have said a compromise between the U.S. and China could be on the horizon, but those negotiations have repeatedly collapsed (see 13112217). Both sides blame each other for the problems (see 13112727). Nonetheless, “as host to the APEC leaders’ meeting this year, ITA expansion is an opportunity for China to deliver a strong economic and trade outcome to the region. Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines, and others in the neighborhood are heavily reliant on tech trade and are big supporters of ITA expansion,” said Neuffer, saying ITA progress could invigorate multilateral negotiation progress at the World Trade Organization. “There are high expectations that China can seize this APEC moment to clear a path forward that will allow all the negotiating parties involved in ITA expansion to return to Geneva to conclude this landmark trade deal this year.” Many trade supporters are also targeting progress on a Trans-Pacific Partnership deal at APEC (see 1410300001).

U.S. trade policy continues to lag behind Internet-related developments in global trade, and the U.S. should adjust its trade approach more for services as that sector grows at a quick pace, said the Computer and Communications Industry Association in comments to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. USTR asked for comments in mid-August to compile its annual report on foreign trade barriers. "The Internet has been the single biggest component of the cross border trade in services, with many of those services facilitating the international goods trade as well,” said CCIA in the comments released Wednesday night. “To protect U.S. economic interests, U.S. trade policy needs to prioritize addressing barriers to the Internet and Internet enabled services, given their key role in the U.S. economy and U.S. export growth.” Digital trade is inhibited by global Internet infrastructure mandates for local production, filtering and blocking of online material, and poor intellectual property protections, the CCIA said. Customs procedures and small shipment tariffs are also obstacles, said the association. Several lawmakers recently asked the USTR to work to ease cross-border data flows (see 1410280026).

Colombia’s National Spectrum Agency is on the right track in announcing its intention to allocate an additional 25 MHz of spectrum for wireless services, 4G Americas said in a news release Tuesday. The spectrum Colombia will offer is 5 MHz in the 900 MHz band, and 20 MHz at 1.9 GHz. Colombia has 49 million mobile subscribers out of the 714 million subscribers in the Latin America region, the group said.

Recent congressional pressure to ease cross-border data flows has the potential to fuel economic growth and job generation in the U.S., said the Telecommunications Industry Association Monday. Four senators urged the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative Friday to remove data flow restrictions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (see 1410270005). "The ability to send commercial data across borders with minimal unnecessary restrictions is vital for U.S. businesses of all sizes and all sectors that conduct business here in the United States and around the world,” said the TIA. “A great example is how e-commerce has rapidly become the way that U.S. small businesses access global markets to expand their exports.” Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and ranking member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, alongside Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and ranking member John Thune, R-S.D., had sent the letter to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman.

The ITU Plenipotentiary shouldn’t “initiate or authorize a treaty-making process or otherwise develop binding agreements on international security or cybersecurity,” said Danielle Kriz, Information Technology Industry Council global cybersecurity policy director, in a blog post Sunday. The ITU “lacks the expertise to deal with many technical and legal matters, including cybersecurity and cybercrime,” she said. The plenipotentiary should “oppose” any expansion of the ITU Standards Bureau into “new areas of cybersecurity standardization” and should avoid efforts to have the bureau partner with other standard development organizations, said Kriz. ITU member countries elected Houlin Zhao of China as the ITU’s new secretary-general last week (see 1410240047). Zhao will take over as secretary general Jan. 1.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation ranked 125 countries on the amount of taxes and duties applied to information and communications technology goods, said ITIF in a report released Monday. Thirty-one countries impose taxes and duties that exceed 5 percent on ICT products, and Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Iran and Turkey are considered the “worst offenders,” said the ITIF. Governments frequently use ICT tariffs "in the mostly vain pursuit of protecting domestic industries" even though "when businesses face extra costs for importing goods, this gets reflected in their subsequent export price -- hurting their competitive position," ITIF said. Goods in the ICT sector are also seen by governments as an easy source of tax revenue because the products are considered as more of a luxury, it said. "These added costs limit ICT adoption and the productivity increases associated with it," it said. "If countries resist the temptation to impose excess taxes on ICT goods and services and eliminate ICT tariffs, they will reap the benefits in broader digital adoption by businesses and consumers, leading to faster economic growth and increased quality of life." The ITIF has spearheaded for years expansion of the Information Technology Agreement. Parties to the ITA, which total in the dozens, haven’t broadened the list of duty exempt products since the agreement’s 1996 inception, despite many IT industry developments.