United State Senator Ron Wyden recently published a statement in Wired supporting his claim that the Fast Track Bill will help in protecting the Internet as well as keeping it open.
Senator Wyden told Wired, "In my view, the trade promotion authority bill I introduced last week, along with the Trans Pacific Partnership that is still being negotiated, both present real opportunities to preserve and protect an open internet around the world."
Senator Wyden added that the trade promotion bill will help create new set of rules as well as priorities in order to ensure that information distribution along the Internet can freely cross national borders. According to Senator Wyden, repressive regimes in countries like China and Russia have strict rules when it comes to censorship of information being posted or distributed in the Internet.
Despite presenting interesting points of argument about the sensitive topic, many internet activists were skeptical about the real reason behind the rushed approval of the Fast Track Bill.
According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, contrary to Senator Wyden's argument, the free flow of information does not protect the internet. The group added that the idea of free flowing of information was designed in order to suppress data localization laws thus preventing countries from forcing content providers from censoring, filtering and blocking contents from the Internet.
Another argument present by the EFF is that the Trans-Pacific Partnership enforces extreme and outdated copyright provisions. It was pointed that the copyright provisions provided by the TPP is just an abstracted of policies currently imposed in the US, mainly the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMC).
Lastly, the EFF said that the implementation of the provisions provided by the TPP will severely impact US Laws especially those concerned with trade agreements.