Corporate Counsel Quotes Kevin Wolf on Commerce Dept. Draft Rules for Foreign IT Suppliers

Corporate Counsel has quoted Akin Gump international trade partner Kevin Wolf in the article “Lawyers, Clients Concerned by Sweeping Commerce Dept. Draft Rules for Foreign IT Suppliers.” The article discusses proposed rules by the Department of Commerce that would authorize it to review information technology and communications transactions involving what it describes as “foreign adversaries” of the United States.

According to Corporate Counsel, the new regulation creates a lot of uncertainty about which supply chain transactions might be affected. If implemented, Wolf said the rules “would essentially be a standard-less delegation of broad ‘case-by-case’ authority that would impose a cloud over most international trade transactions.”

“There would be no way,” Wolf continued, “for a U.S. or foreign person to know which countries, companies, individuals, products, technologies, software, or services could lead to a unilateral decision by the Secretary of Commerce” to stop or alter a transaction at any time after it is completed. “It is a very short amount of time to prepare comments on something that significant and broad in scope,” he said.

Greater clarity is needed in the final regulation, Wolf added. “Commerce should publish in a second proposed rule an unclassified version of the threat to the information, communications, and technology supply chain, so that a final rule can be tailored to address that threat and without creating significant uncertainty in the international trade system,” he said.