Formal opinion · 2014
Volet numérique du partenariat transatlantique de commerce et d'investissement
[The digital dimension of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — Conseil national du numérique (French national digital council) opinion, 2014]
Opinion on the digital dimensions of the transatlantic trade negotiation, covering in particular data flows, personal data protection and the cultural exception.
The subject of this opinion no longer exists: the transatlantic negotiation was suspended and then abandoned. That is precisely what gives it its archival value, and there is no point looking for a present-day relevance it does not have.
What is worth noting is that the question outlived its framework. The opinion voiced concern in 2014 about the conditions under which Europeans’ personal data could flow to the United States. That question was not settled by a trade treaty but by a succession of adequacy decisions and legal challenges: Safe Harbor invalidated, Privacy Shield adopted and then invalidated in turn, a third framework adopted since. The opinion had identified the right point of friction; it had been wrong about the instrument through which it would surface.
One thing fell entirely outside the field of vision in 2014: the extraterritorial reach of US law over service providers, formalised four years later. That became the central argument in the French debate on trusted cloud computing, and nothing in this opinion hinted at it.