TPP protest songs: CI takes a pop at secretive trade agreement

Jeremy Malcolm blogs on two new music videos launched today which challenge the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and aim to raise awareness of  this consumer rights issue.

 

As negotiators for the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement meet in Bali this week, consumers remain in the dark about how it will affect them. 

Two new music videos that we release today send a strong message to the negotiators – either open up the agreement, or we need to stop the TPP!

The secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement could overturn rules on topics as diverse as intellectual property, food labelling and financial services regulation in twelve countries of the Pacific Rim. 

From today senior officials from those countries are meeting at the APEC meeting in Bali, where they hope to advance the negotiations towards closure this year.

Consumers deserve to be a part of these negotiations.  So until we find out what the officials are planning to agree on our behalf, we need to stop the TPP! 

That is the simple message that Consumers International sends out today with the release of two new shareable music videos to raise public awareness of this impending threat to consumer rights.

The videos could not be more different from each other, either musically or visually, but both brilliantly convey our concerns about this undemocratic treaty under negotiation.

The first is 'No to the TPP' (No Al TPP), a beautiful and stirring bossanova-style song in Spanish by the Grammy Award nominated Chilean musician Ana Tijoux, with an evocative music video directed by Fourd Alzamora.

The second music video is an irresistibly catchy J-pop number called 'Stop the TPP!' (みんなでストップ！TPP) by Japanese musicians Emi Nakada and Citron178.  They released the audio of their original Japanese version earlier in the year, but today CI launches an accompanying animation video as well as an English language vocal version.  We even have a karoke version to which you can sing along!

Emi explains why she made the song: “The subject matter of the TPP is so complicated that people can't easily understand how it affects them.  To alert the people as soon as possible to the risks surrounding the TPP, I wrote lyrics that explain the TPP to everyone in simple terms, while singing happily!  I want you to please use this song as one quick way to simply convey this message to a lot of people!”

Emi collaborated on the track with Citron178 who is a composer of anime (Japanese animation) songs.  This is particularly apt given that the anime fan subculture is one of those threatened by the TPP's rules on intellectual property, which would interfere with the creation of homages such as fan art and “cosplay” (fancy dress) designs.

She writes: “In Japan, not much is known about the effects of the intellectual property chapter of the TPP, but it is likely to regulate the creation of fan fiction.  So in order to send a message to geeks, who like to make secondary creative works like this, I had to make a song in the style of anime songs.”  But the threat of the TPP goes further.  “Once you join the TPP, genetically modified foods come in, food safety is lost, health and life are threatened... The risk of losing everything you need for living is high.  It is no doubt that it is a primary concern for consumers!”

Please share both of these brilliant music videos as widely as you can, to send a strong message that we need to Stop the TPP!  In the words of Ana's song 'No to the TPP':

A treaty is not democratic if it is made behind the people
And your deal is not a deal if it is made secretly and without consensus
We all have the right and we all want to decide
The future and present of our children and how they want to live
No to the TPP

Is your ISP telling the truth?

Jeremy Malcolm, co-author of CI’s new publication aiming to help consumer organisations campaign for better broadband, on why we need to take on the ISPs. 

 According to CI's global research on broadband conducted with 20 of our members last year, Internet service providers (ISPs) are keeping consumers in the dark when it comes to quality and value. 

To be more specific, they commonly misadvertise the Internet speeds they provide, with “up to” speeds being claimed that do not represent anything like the actual average speeds that users can expect to experience in practice.

Baffled by the figures

Consumers are also confused by download caps, fair usage policies and other terms and conditions that are disclosed only in the “small print” of their agreements with their ISPs, if at all. 

Even if a particular ISP provides all of this information in a fair and understandable manner, the consumer who is shopping around for a new broadband connection will need to be able to compare it with what other ISPs offer – but is $30 per month for an 8Gb ADSL plan with a 20Gb cap better or worse than 30c per day for a 3G plan with a 50Mb cap? The consumer is likely to have no idea.

Keeping consumers locked in

Moreover, once a consumer signs up to a contract with their ISP, the ISP will do everything within its power to stop them from leaving, by locking them in to a long-term contract. This is done in one of two ways:

•  A broadband contract typically runs for between 18 months and 2 years - and often rolls over automatically to be extended even longer! In some cases, a “free” device or “free” installation is used as a sweetner. But many consumers, if offered the choice, would rather bear those up-front costs in exchange for the freedom to switch providers on a month's notice.
•  Providers will often bundle several products together, sometimes for a “discount” rate. The consumer who is unhappy with one of the components of that bundle may find themselves stuck with it, because they do not wish to lose other bundled items. This too locks them in to a single provider, limiting choice and competition.

To help solve these problems – misstatement and confusion about the terms, conditions and capacities of Internet services, and the “locking in” of consumers to long-term commitments – CI has published Holding Broadband Providers to Account: A Consumer Advocacy Manual.

Campaigning for better broadband

The manual is designed to help de-tangle these issues for consumer organisations creating consumer-facing campaigns around broadband services.

Amongst the recommendations made in the manual is the promotion of a standard Broadband Disclosure Statement. This sets out the most important variables in a standardised, easily understood and comparable form, including speed, reliability, service limits and conditions, pricing and other information such as privacy policy. 

We have created Take a look at the sample Broadband Disclosure Statement illustrated here completed for a fictional ISP called iStall. 

CI's A2Knetwork.org microsite contains a downloadable version of this form in several formats, along with an expanded version which adds additional measurements, and more detail of the conditions that apply to bundling of products, and consumer privacy.  You can use these as models for ISPs in your country to adopt voluntarily, or for regulators to specify as an industry standard.  

A second measure that our broadband manual recommends is the campaign theme, “Don't Lock Me In!”.  Consumers are best served by a competitive market for Internet services, and forcing consumers into long term contracts or to accept an inflexible bundle of products can distort that market, giving them a poorer deal.   

We recommend that consumer groups advocate for a maximum contract term of 12 months, and that the components of service bundles should be separable without significant financial penalty.

What can you do to help in the fight for fairer, more transparent and accessible broadband services for consumers?

•  If you are a consumer of broadband, contact your local Consumers International member. Amongst the CI members working on our campaign “Holding Broadband Service Providers to Account” are IDEC from Brazil, Consumer Council of Fiji, the Kenya Consumers Organization, Colectivo Ecologista Jalisco from Mexico, ADEC from Senegal and Consumers Korea.
•  If you are a consumer advocate yourself, we have prepared a variety of resources that you can use to campaign on the above themes. In addition to the consumer advocacy manual itself, you can download template designs for posters or postcards from our A2Knetwork.org microsite, which are ready to customise with your name, logo and website address. Our Consumer in the Digital Age network also exists to provide CI members with advice and support.

Breaking ground in the fight for consumer rights in Asia Pacific and Middle East

Following the success of World Consumer Rights Day, Indrani Thuraisingham, Head of CI Office for Asia Pacific and the Middle East, explains why it’s an exciting time for the region.

 
 

World Consumer Rights Day (WCRD) is a great opportunity to see the strength of our members in the Asia Pacific and Middle East region. This year, WCRD focused on consumer choice in financial services. Members from more than 23 countries in our region participated in events to mark the occasion.

Even the newly-formed, one-month-old consumer organisation in Afghanistan, the Consumer Rights and Services Organization (CRSO), (who is in the process of applying for CI membership) joined in by having the first-ever WCRD celebration in their country.

I travelled to Bangladesh to celebrate WCRD with the Consumers Association of Bangladesh, a CI member. There are more than seven million Bangladeshis working overseas and these workers often face high charges of between 5% and 20% every time they send money home.

We are working on this issue as part of our Global Money Transfers project.

In Bangladesh, if you want a copy of your bank statement urgently, you would need to pay USD10 for it. If you’re willing to wait up to five days, then you would need to pay only USD3. All this for your own bank account statement!

Our Consumers for Fair Financial Services campaign fighting for this to be something everyone should be entitled to for free.

The following day I was in India where I was one of the guests of honour at CI member Consumers Association of India’s 10^th anniversary international conference on the theme, ‘Is the consumer really the king?’ Here I talked about the need for consumer organisations to use Facebook and other social media tools to raise awareness on consumer rights and responsibilities.

Come and ‘like’ CI’s Facebook page and see how we are using social media to raise awareness of consumer issues around the globe.

The CI regional meeting for Asia Pacific and the Middle East

Our office for Asia Pacific and the Middle East hosted the regional members’ meeting and conference: ‘Consumers in the Information Society: Access, Fairness and Representation’ in Kuala Lumpur. Fifty-one participants representing 37 organisations from 20 countries attended this meeting.

In-depth discussions were held on CI’s new strategic direction for the next four years and the five priority programmes that CI will focus on: financial services, food, consumers in the digital age, sustainable consumption, and consumer protection and legislation. In addition, our new strategy has a renewed focus on organisational empowerment; where CI helps members to help themselves.

Member organisations were reminded to be in continuous communication with CI on their activities in relation to CI’s priority programmes as well as emerging issues and concerns. This gives us the strength as a unified voice to collectively bring changes in terms of policy as well as corporations’ behaviour and practices.

One of these areas was taken up at the conference by CI's Director General Helen McCallum, who delivered a speech on emerging ICT technologies. The speech considered the networks we use to communicate (such as the Internet); the devices we use to do so (such as smartphones and computers); and the rules that regulate content passing through these devices and networks (such as intellectual property rights and privacy law). All of these are major issues for consumers in our region.

This office will work towards building a CI brand that is synonymous with consumer rights and protection. We will encourage and ensure all members from the region belong to at least one priority programme that is relevant to their work.

It’s an exciting time. We will form partnerships with relevant stakeholders to achieve our objective of bringing change, and look for strategic members to further strengthen our presence as the sole global consumer voice championing consumer rights.

We do this work because CI belongs to its member organisations; organisations that are fighting for consumer rights across the Asia Pacific and Middle East region.

Consumer access to knowledge is vital for Africa's development

Dieunedort Wandji of Consumers International explains why consumer protection in the digital age is so important to Africa and developing countries. 

Although consumer protection is weak in many developing countries, consumers across the Global South will make a giant leap in claiming their rights by effectively benchmarking international advocacy on digital consumer rights issues.

This was the impression I was left with after attending Consumers International’s Access to Knowldge (A2K) meeting (Consumers in the Information Society: Access, Fairness and Representation, 8-9 March, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia).  The diversity of participants and far-reaching content captured the varied and versatile challenges of consumers in the digital age. Many of which are crucial to the developing world. 


As I sat through all these inspiring presentations about consumer protection in the information society and tried to make sense of them from an African perspective, it began to dawn on me that the developing world’s stake in this battle is a double-fold one.

African consumers in particular are poised to benefit more than anyone else from CI’s vanguard approach in the protection of consumers in the information society, as laid out at Kuala Lumpur meeting.

As he plays his games on my laptop, my five-year-old son is still suspicious about my story that, growing up in Africa, it was not until I became a university student that I was able to first set eyes on a computer. I presume the African digital consumer of tomorrow is likely to be unaware of a lot that has come before. While enjoying doing creative work, tomorrow’s African consumer might not realise just how much RMC (Rights Management Corporations) had twisted laws to invade privacy or abused technology to pervert ownership rights. 


I look forward to the time in Africa when the digital consumer will have no knowledge of today’s limitations and frustrations.  This unawareness of past battles will however depend on how quickly and efficiently African consumer rights groups pick up the pace of international advocacy trends today. More precisely, this will depend on their ability to build on CI’s A2K momentum so as to tackle the twin issues currently affecting the African consumer in fast changing digital markets: access and protection.

As any advance in digital technology nowadays carries a global impact, it is of critical importance that the efforts of the consumer movement in the developing world be inversely proportional to the number of actual users of digital products and services.

There are challenges lying ahead for consumer organisations in the developing world. Apart from the necessity for African countries to emulate the policies and regulations of European countries, there is the need to prevent developing countries from becoming retreat bases for failed RMC abuse attempts. In fact, as has been the case with tobacco regulations, there is concern that vulnerable copyright regulatory frameworks can be taken advantage of, to implement abusive policies that could not be pushed through in the developed world. For instance, it has now become illegal in India to share a joke over the internet, without appropriately quoting your sources!

Yet again, as much as the digital consumer needs protection in Africa, campaigning for access remains equally important. The latest CI Global Consumer Survey on Broadband (pdf)  for instance suggests that access to broadband technology is becoming a “prerequisite for consumers’ full participation in civic and cultural life”. At the same time, many experts report that less than 5% of Africans having access to new technologies such as computers, smart phones and other devices that support access to broadband. 

The digital divide seems to be widening and taking on various forms. Instead of being commensurate to local income levels, IT products turn out to be more expensive on African markets. Just as we are revolted by the mere thought that public libraries in their present form would never have existed, had current copyright laws preceded them, it is equally unacceptable that access to collective knowledge in Africa should be hampered through abusive regulations, unfair pricing and contrived technological barriers.