U.S. Chamber of Commerce Endorses USMCA

I’m sure this is because it is another huge win for the American worker. I mean that has to be why Tom Donahue is supporting it:

“The influential U.S. Chamber of Commerce has formally endorsed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement and will help the Trump administration win support for the deal in Congress — but warned against a withdrawal from NAFTA.

“After carefully assessing the new deal and its impact on our members, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has thrown its support behind the USMCA, which is critical to maintaining strong economic growth in the U.S.,” Tom Donohue, the chamber’s president and CEO, wrote in an online post today. …”

What the hell is in this thing?

“President Trump hailed the trade agreement he signed with Mexico and Canada last week as “great for all our countries.” Perhaps he doesn’t know that the NAFTA-replacing trade agreement, USMCA, gives tech giants in Silicon Valley a special legal privilege to censor his own supporters — and anyone else they find “objectionable.”

Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube all engaged in pre-election censorship against Republicans and Trump supporters. Yet they’ve managed to sneak a liability protection into President Trump’s trade bill that would make it even easier for them to censor their own users.

USMCA entrenches the tech giants’ legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grant them legal immunity for user-generated content. This is an important part of the law that allows tech platforms to host a wide variety of speech with light-touch moderation.

But USMCA also entrenches tech companies’ right to censor without liability. Article 19.17 of the trade agreement gives tech companies immunity from any lawsuits arising from actions taken to “restrict material it considers to be harmful or objectionable.”

Section 230 has a similarly problematic provision, which needs to be amended by the next Congress if the censorship of the internet is to be stopped. But the new, even broader censorship provision, will make it nearly impossible for the tech giants’ privilege of legal immunity from any lawsuit that arises out of their censorship practices to be taken away.

Whereas Section 230 can be amended by the U.S. congress, USMCA is a trade agreement – once ratified by all three nations (the U.S., Canada, and Mexico), it will take further agreement from the three nations to amend it. And only one of those countries has a First Amendment. Canada, with its wide-ranging hate speech laws and far-left Prime Minister, would see little reason to make it harder for tech companies to censor “objectionable” content…”

Oh …

Even if a future Republican Congress managed to somehow act to protect free speech on the internet, USMCA would give Mexico and Canada the ability to veto it.