Good afternoon,
Today's lead story is an opinion column from the US Ambassador to Australia, directly appealing to our government to scrap data sovereignty laws.
The US Government wishes to use the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations to boost Australian corporate and Government investment in US-owned cloud computing services hosted primarily offshore.
As John Hilvert noted last year, if this part of the TPP is ratified by the nine countries negotiating the pact in secret, US cloud providers would be able to argue that the cloud policies of AGIMO (for Australian Government agencies) and APRA (for regulated financial institutions) would be in breach of fair trade agreements.
The US administration has much to gain if that happens. American companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace, Salesforce and Google have built scale and automation into their cloud operations that Australian telcos and IT service providers simply don't have the resources to match.
So far, Australian negotiators have resisted several key clauses within the TPP. They won't, for example, allow multinational corporations to sue governments for anti-competitive behaviour, a dangerous prospect after Parliament passed plain-packaging legislation to counter Big Tobacco.
How should Australian negotiators approach the cloud issue? I'm interested in your opinion.
-- Brett Winterford |
