Free Trade Zone for Trust Frameworks

Session Topic: Free Trade Zones

Tuesday 3I

Convener: Colin Wallis, Jeff Stollman

Notes-taker(s): Jeff Stollman

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Building general-purpose trust frameworks is something hard that attempts to do something that has never been done: build a global (not just a multi-national) system. Because the internet is global by definition, general-purpose trust frameworks would be open to anyone, unless specific efforts were undertaken to restrict them.

Problems with multi-jurisdictional systems is that local laws/regulations are often at odds with each other. This imposes limits on our ability to forge global systems.

Two concepts might help address this:

Free-trade zones that allow data storage and handling independent of such current conflicts as laws the demand immediate destruction of certain data versus other laws that demand retention of the same information.

Treaties that exempt certain activities from local law and allow for a consistent legal regime for those activities among treaty signatories.

We discussed the fact that one way to initiate these concepts might be to follow the money, notably international money flows. Begin with small countries that transfer lots of money (e.g., Liechtenstein or Luxembourg) and have less incentive to resist being a free-trade zone because they would gain business, rather than lose it.