{"id":521527,"date":"2010-04-08T22:49:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-09T02:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100407\/1618498916.shtml"},"modified":"2010-04-08T22:49:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-09T02:49:00","slug":"ustr-releases-openness-plan-while-celebrating-that-its-in-the-pocket-of-industry-lobbyists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/521527","title":{"rendered":"USTR Releases Openness Plan, While Celebrating That It’s In The Pocket Of Industry Lobbyists"},"content":{"rendered":"

We were confused a few weeks ago when the USTR started promoting letters from lobbyists<\/a> in support of ACTA. After all, of course the lobbyists want ACTA. They’re the ones who wrote much of it in the first place. In the meantime, thousands have been writing the USTR to express their concerns about ACTA… but the USTR doesn’t bother mentioning them at all. It’s as if the USTR is flat-out admitting that it’s controlled by the lobbyists.<\/p>\n

So it should come as no surprise that the USTR is gleefully hyping up two more letters from lobbying groups<\/a> in favor of ACTA. But why won’t it put forth the letters against ACTA or worried about the process? And, of course, as Jamie Love points out<\/a>, isn’t it weird that these lobbyists are proudly supporting an agreement when, technically, they’re not even supposed to know what’s in the agreement?<\/p>\n

What’s even stranger is that all of this comes on the same day that the USTR has released its plan on being more open<\/a>. How about, for a start, you open up ACTA, stop hiding behind lobbyists, and allow for a real open discussion involving the real stakeholders? Or is that too much to ask? Well, included in the openness plan is the following:<\/p>\n


\nDuring the building of this plan, recommendations centered around two issues: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations and all other trade-related meetings. There was a desire to make all advisory committee, negotiating, and policy development meetings, and texts available to the public in “real time.”
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And yet, rather than any sort of real time release of information, we get the USTR still hiding the documents behind a bogus claim of “national security” and then showing off the fact that it’s in the pocket of lobbyists who aren’t even supposed to know what’s in the document.<\/p>\n

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We were confused a few weeks ago when the USTR started promoting letters from lobbyists in support of ACTA. After all, of course the lobbyists want ACTA. They’re the ones who wrote much of it in the first place. In the meantime, thousands have been writing the USTR to express their concerns about ACTA… but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}