[typon]

I would be okay with minutia or details like these, making it a highly complex trade agreement. What i can never swallow is the secrecy. If it really is a good trade deal, why not make it transparent? They should be publishing it online, searchable and indexable with consice summaries for every section. This deal will literally affect billions of people, the people have a right to know.

[pzone]

Here's a summary. https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...

Here's the full text. https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/tran...

Google mentioned in their press release that they were not happy about the secrecy in the negotiations. The negotiations were secret for the same reason diplomatic cables are secret. These agreements would involve things like Japan agreeing to to stop subsidizing rice farmers as long as it can keep its high auto tariffs for a few decades. It's nasty stuff, embarrassing to watch the sausage get made. But maybe it was a bad idea to do it all in secrecy.

[MichaelGG]

The reasoning provided is that negotiators can't do their jobs well if every single thing they ask for is publicized then politicized. Unfortunately this ends up with a treaty that no one wants to renegotiate, a take-it-or-leave-it deal with a bunch of sunk costs.

[vidarh]

There is a lot of middle ground between keeping something secret until there's something take-it-or-leave-it vs. publishing every "what if we do X, will you then let us do Y" back and forth. If more intermediate work products are unfit for public eyes, perhaps they shouldn't be going there in the first place.

[MichaelGG]

OK but what would they publish? General ideas? The details being published would only lead to a mess as each company could advertise and make a fuss over things. Or other countries might do the same to shift things in their favor. The end goal for each country is to do things to benefit themselves, even if it means making hard decisions.

It's not like spy exchange negotiations or all other sorts of diplomatic processes are public. And it's not that things are unfit for the public per se, just that publishing each move isn't beneficial.

Yikes I never thought I'd be defending TPP-like processes. Personally I think we're (the world) not yet ready for this level of globalisation, unfortunately.

[vidarh]

Spy exhanges and most diplomatic processes rarely gets enshrined in law. At least not without the resulting law being written in a far more open process afterwards (e.g. consider changes after the Troubles in Northern Ireland - the negotiations certainly didn't happen in the limelight, but the subsequent legal changes in the UK did happen in the open).

Whether or not "publishing each move" is beneficial depends on what "each move" is. I agree that at the most fine grained level, you don't want everyone to find out how far you were willing to go in conversations with one opposing negotiator, in case you need to negotiate similar clauses with someone else, for example.

But once you have agreed that you're giving X in return for Y, publishing that should not do much harm unless giving X is controversial. In which case the "harm" might be exactly what ought to happen.

Here's another example, which is more relevant:

During Norways EEA negotiations with the EU, the Norwegian press reported details pretty much daily. I just checked the archive of one of Norways largest papers to confirm my memory, and from '90 to '92, EEA was mentioned about 5000 times, and included things like government ministers informing the press about likely contents of Norwegian negotiation positions that had not yet been presented to the EU (but where the overall lines of the EU position was known - in one case I looked at, the minister confirmed that the Norwegian position would overall come close to what the EU had asked for in terms of regulation of granting operating licenses for EU companies in certain areas).

They certainly did not get access to everything, but they got regular briefings, and it contributed to ensuring the debate over whether or not to join the EEA shaped the negotiations, as the sitting, pro-EEA government got very clear signals about which concessions would cause the biggest problems with the opposition and/or cost them voters.