About - Staff Member - Ed Brzytwa
Blog Contributors
Ed Brzytwa
Areas of Expertise:
Localization, Trade, and Multilateral Affairs
Favorite Innovation:
Antikythera mechanism
Ed Brzytwa is ITI’s director of global policy for localization, trade, and multilateral affairs. Ed’s work focuses primarily on leading ITI’s efforts to craft and pursue both global and market-specific approaches to ensuring free cross-border data flows and addressing government policies relating to the localization of data, products, services, and business activities.
Prior to joining ITI, Ed Brzytwa served as the director for APEC affairs at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) and the lead policy advisor for USTR on issues arising in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC). There he led U.S. government interagency teams at APEC meetings, led innovative initiatives in APEC to advance U.S. trade and investment policy interests, negotiated substantial trade and investment outcomes for the U.S. in APEC Leaders and Ministerial statements, was responsible for developing, analyzing, and coordinating policy on APEC matters within USTR and in the interagency process, and worked closely with private sector stakeholders, academia, and representatives from multilateral organizations.
From 2005-2012, Ed was a U.S. negotiator on non-tariff barrier to trade issues in the Doha Development Agenda negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO), first at the Department of Commerce and then at USTR. He has also worked on a wide array of policy issues related to digital trade, localization barriers to trade, investment, technical barriers to trade, export restraints, trade facilitation, and sanitary and phytosanitary measures.
As a Fulbright fellow in 2003-2004, Ed earned a Master’s degree at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna in Austria. He also has a Master’s degree in Commercial Diplomacy from the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California (now the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey) and a Bachelor’s degree in The Classics from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and there attended St. Ignatius High School. Ed, his wife Mary Chasko, and their daughter Lila reside happily in Bethesda, Maryland.
Blog posts by Ed Brzytwa
-
NAFTA’s Sweet Spot for a Tech Enabled Economy
(August 04, 2017)
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) agreement negotiated 25 years ago predates many technologies we use every day, even some of the companies that created them, and would benefit from an update. ...
-
G20 Digital Economy Outcomes - Avoiding the Elephant in the Room
(April 20, 2017)
Since it first addressed information and communication technology issues in 2015 (see paragraph 26 in the 2015 Leaders Communiqué), the G20 forum has become a critically important setting for the world’s ...
-
Using International Fora to Address Forced Localization
(October 28, 2016)
As we have described in our blog series, the complex challenge of forced localization requires thoughtful, tailored solutions at both the domestic and international levels. ITI and our partners DIGITALEUROPE ...
-
ITI in New Delhi: Expanding Digital India
(September 27, 2016)
This week ITI is participating in a wide range of meetings with Indian government officials in New Delhi alongside official government-to-government meetings taking place between India and the United States. ...
-
Promoting Digital Trade in the Asia-Pacific through Data Privacy Cooperation
(August 23, 2016)
ITI has returned from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum meetings held in Lima, Peru, last week on data privacy and digital trade. Economies and stakeholders at the forum discussed how ...