On September 17, 2026, Open Net and Tifa Foundation co-hosted a policy lab "Platform Power, Consumer Rights, and Corporate Accountability in Asia-Pacific: Advancing UNGPs in the digital economy". Data protection violations and breaches increasingly occur across borders, yet redress mechanisms remain fragmented, domestic, and poorly coordinated between jurisdictions, leaving consumers without functional remedy when platforms or states fail to cooperate. Digital trade agreements increasingly mandate cross-border data flow as a condition of market access, but rarely mandate cross-border redress interoperability alongside it, entrenching platform power ahead of rights-respecting regulation. In 2026 alone, the US has signed Agreements on Reciprocal Trade (ARTs) with Indonesia, Taiwan, and Malaysia, while ASEAN has concluded negotiations on its own Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA), targeted for signing at the November 2026 ASEAN Summit, locking in region-wide cross-border data flow commitments at the exact moment this session's core question, whether redress can keep pace, remains unresolved. Without deliberately designed interoperability between redress systems, the digital economy will keep outrunning consumer protection. This session turns that diagnosis into a concrete conversation about what States and platforms must do next.

KS Park started the discussion as follows:

South Korea, being an early adopter of everything, suffered ultra-massive data breaches a way earlier than other countries even within Asia where the vertical social structure makes personal data gravitate toward big silos in the governments or the oligopolistic companies that passed elite muster. These incidents often go unredressed due to the fact that the breached data are abused secretly by bad actors with no provenance linked to the incidents. In response, the country passed probably the world's first law in 2015 that allows civil recovery for data breach without evidence of damages (Article 39-2) (really, the statutory text does not include the term "damage").

Asian Pacific Digital Consumer Dialogue have worked to upgrade data protection chapters in digital trade agreements to include such provision but to no avail so far especially civil society is being given no visibility on DEFA, for instance. But as Javier Ruiz Diaz has said, the companies driving trade negotiations want to sell goods to consumers. Hopely, the coalition efforts of big consumer organizations and small digital rights organizations (namely APDCD) will pay off.

However, redressability is still hampered by the "diffused interest" dilemma where the socially huge harms go unredressed for lack of incentives for affected data subjects to invest time and efforts into civil suits which will recover only usually small compensation for the uncertain itinerary of the breached data. A correct response will be class action lawsuits which have been painfully slow in adoption.

UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights has not really looked squarely at judicial reform as within their turf but I think digital area is a good entry point to think about expanding the scope of their work into such issues as adoption of class action. That will be a bonanza not just for the digital rights but also for environmental, labor, and other issues.

The participants discussed around two questions: (1) what a workable cross-border redress mechanism, interoperability, looks like for consumers; and (2) the distinct but linked responsibilities of States and platforms under the UNGPs in enabling access to remedy.