New NAFTA Trade Deal Misses Chance To Nullify FOSTA Law, EFF Says

WASHINGTON, D.C.—After Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to do away with NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement—calling the agreement "the worst trade deal ever made,” on September 30, Trump announced a new version of NAFTA which has been rebranded as the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement, or USMCA, which internet civil liberties advocates say constitutes a missed opportunity to effectively do away with the FOSTA law supposedly aimed at stopping online “sex trafficking.” FOSTA, signed into law by Trump in April after passing both the House and Senate in overwhelming, bipartisan votes, creates an exception to the once-revered Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 protects internet service providers from liability for activities by other providers using their sites. For example, under Section 230, Facebook could not be sued over libelous posts made by users on the platform. Section 230 is generally credited with making free expression on the internet possible. But FOSTA carves out an exception to Section 230, holding sites responsible for supposed “sex trafficking” activities, such as classified ads for sexual services, posted by third party users. The NAFTA replacement includes language that keeps the Section 230 protections in place, according to the news site Quartz. As a result, internet freedom advocates, and internet trade groups, praised the deal. “I’m thrilled,” Berin Szoka, president of technology policy think tank TechFreedom. “This is the best-case scenario, in that they have closely paraphrased Section 230.” But other online civil liberties advocates noted with dismay that the “USMCA” deal continues to carve out an exception for “sex trafficking,” specifically referring to FOSTA in the agreement, according to the Inside Sources news site.  “Traditionally the United States has always tried to export its strong intermediary liability protections to the rest of the world and that’s always been quite positive for the internet,” said Danny O’Brien, of the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The agreement has this huge hole in it, that removes any real advantage [Section 230] has.” Sex workers have widely opposed the FOSTA law, saying that rather than protecting them from traffickers, the law makes their occupation more dangerous by pushing sex work off the internet and back underground, making sex workers more vulnerable to exploitation and even violence, due to the inability to control their own businesses and to pre-screen clientele. Image by Alex Covarrubias / Wikimedia Commons