Orrin Hatch: “I want to take a few minutes today to talk once again about Congress's role in advancing our Nation's trade policies and…”

“I want to take a few minutes today to talk once again about Congress's role in advancing our Nation's trade policies and specifically on the increasingly important issues of digital trade and intellectual property rights. Let's keep in mind that the last time Congress passed TPA was in 2002. We live in a very different world than we did 13 years ago. Technology is vastly different. Commerce is vastly different. For example, in 2002, less than 700 million people worldwide had access to the Internet. Last year, that figure reached nearly 3 billion--with a ``b''--3 billion people. In 2002, e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay were just beginning to gain widespread use. Special media sites and other platforms that today drive so much Internet traffic and user-generated content--sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter-- did not even exist. In the last 13 years, an entirely new economy has developed based on these online platforms. Today, Facebook has around 1.4 billion--with a ``b''--active users, with approximately 83 percent living outside of the United States of America and Canada. YouTube has more than 1 billion users, with local interfaces in 75 countries and compatibility with 61 different languages. Mobile technology has similarly been transformed since 2002, as the term ``smart phone'' has become part of our regular vocabulary. Mobile phones were big and clunky in 2002 and were not good for much more than making phone calls.…”