The FTC’s safe harbor negotiations with the European Union have become “more difficult,” FTC Commissioner Julie Brill said at a Direct Marketing Association event Monday (see 1412080061). “Expectations in the European public” are “very high” in terms of “doing away with safe harbor or radically altering it,” she said. “The adults of the room understand the difficult situation that they’ve been placed in and they’re trying to come up with a reasonable way out,” Brill said. But the negotiations are “harder now,” she said.

TechAmerica will begin work to form a position on the classification of smart watch products for customs duty purposes, the group said on its website. TechAmerica's Customs Committee formed a working group "to develop common positions to provide in advocacy efforts" with Customs and Border Protection and other countries' customs officials, it said. The effort is in preparation for the World Customs Organization Harmonized System Committee meeting in March, during which one or more smart watches will be classified, it said Wednesday. The classification decisions are used to promote consistency in product tariff treatment around the world. The past few years have seen major progress in smart watch technology, and many TechAmerica members now sell the products, it said. "Due to the different functions included in the smartwatches," several classification categories are being considered, including classification as digital cameras, pedometers or wrist watches, it said: "Depending on how these products ultimately are classified, the rate at which wearable technologies and/or their components are assessed for tariffs can vary significantly."

The European Parliament passed a resolution Thursday urging the EU Commission and member states to “break down barriers to growth” in the EU’s digital single market, a Parliament news release said. “The resolution underlines that ‘the online search market is of particular importance in ensuring competitive conditions within the digital single market’ and welcomes the Commission’s pledges to investigate further the search engines’ practices,” it said. Members of Parliament want EU competition rules enforced and for search engines to be unbundled from other commercial services. They want the EC “to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services” in the long run, the release said. Consumer Watchdog urged the European Parliament to pass the resolution in order to break up Google’s “monopolistic dominance” in the EU, in a news release Thursday. House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., led a Nov. 25 bipartisan letter from House lawmakers to European Parliament officials cautioning them about the resolution’s stemming of cross-border data flows.

The U.K. government will introduce a new counterterrorism and security bill Wednesday, said Home Secretary Theresa May in a speech Monday. The bill is intended to thwart global terrorists, particularly those within the Islamic State (IS), who are planning attacks on the U.K. and other Western nations, she said. The bill will “help control and disrupt the movements” of terrorists traveling abroad to fight in Iraq and Syria and improve the U.K.’s border security, said May. The bill, which would create a privacy and civil liberties board, would also help to “close down at least part of the communications data capability gap” between the terrorism group and the U.K., she said. May cited IS’s “significant propaganda reach” via social media as a significant concern.

The U.S. government and the FCC need to ensure that the ITU “stays focused on its core function” of standards development for broadband access, FCC Commissioner Michael O’Reilly said at a commission meeting Friday. O’Reilly suggested the U.S. should pursue a leadership position at the ITU to continue to promote its agenda. The ITU’s mandate won’t change for the next four years, since no amendments were passed at its recent Plenipotentiary, said Kathryn O’Brien, assistant chief of the FCC International Bureau. The U.S. government had a “very positive outcome” at the conference, she said. Conference proposals that called on the ITU to become involved in surveillance regulations and that would have “undermined” the multistakeholder model were rejected, O’Brien said. The FCC's chief desire is to maintain the ITU’s remit on standards development and best practices for cybersecurity and access to broadband, she said.

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).