President Barack Obama meets with Victoria Espinel, the C.E.O. of the Software Alliance, about the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

When we talk about trade, we often think about material goods. News articles on the subject are illustrated with images of ships weighed down with big, corrugated containers, presumed to be filled with shoes, tires, cell phones, apples. And much of the discussion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal announced earlier this week between the U.S., Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam, Chile, Brunei, Singapore, and New Zealand, has focussed on the movement of such goods across borders. But on Monday, after the deal was announced, some in the tech industry were fixated on a more of-the-moment aspect of the deal: its regulation of the movement of digital information—the substance of our music streams, financial payments, online communications, and just about everything else we do on the Internet.

Among the people interested in these details was Victoria Espinel, the president of a trade group called BSA: The Software Alliance, whose members include Apple, Microsoft, and other influential tech companies. “The ability to use data—the ability to store and analyze it and have it move back and forth across borders—is really important not just to the software industry but to the global economy at large,” Espinel told me. The Software Alliance has been concerned, in particular, that some countries require information about their citizens to be stored on domestic computer servers and not transmitted outside. Not having full access to data makes it difficult for companies to maximize the revenue that comes from digital information; it could also make it hard, in some cases, to even operate in certain countries. Espinel told me that her group lobbied officials involved in negotiating the T.P.P. to include language that would require countries to support the free movement of digital information across national borders.

After the deal was announced, Espinel was cautiously optimistic. The details of the deal haven’t yet been released, and even once the pact is made public, individual countries’ legislators must pass laws putting its provisions into place. But disclosures from officials, along with private conversations between Espinel’s staffers and people familiar with the deal, suggested that the final agreement included a provision like the one the Software Alliance had sought. A fact sheet on the Web site of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative also made reference to that aspect of the agreement, touting that it protects international trade “by preserving free international movement of data, ensuring that individuals, small businesses, and families in all [Trans-Pacific Partnership] countries can take advantage of online shopping, communicate efficiently at low cost, and access, move, and store data freely.” According to the fact sheet, the deal also bans countries from requiring that foreign businesses keep their information, servers, or research facilities within their borders in order to do business there. These are, by far, the most important provisions of the deal for the Software Alliance, Espinel told me. The agreement also benefits large tech companies by eliminating import taxes on information- and communication-technology exports from the U.S., which, in some cases, are as high as thirty-five per cent.

Even within Silicon Valley, though, the T.P.P.—including the provisions covering the movement of information—has been controversial. Espinel made the case that the free flow of data is good for regular people, not only corporations, because when companies can gather and analyze information about us on a global basis, they can hypothetically solve big problems—for instance, in areas such as healthcare. But Maira Sutton, a global-policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which describes itself as a defender of Internet users’ civil liberties, was more circumspect about the development, arguing that it could prevent the passage of laws that benefit Internet users. “There are ways that it’s great—but at the same time, there’s a threat that these free-flow-of-information provisions can undermine data-protection rules,” she said. She pointed out that a country might want, for instance, to pass a law that requires its citizens’ health records to be kept within its borders, in order to protect their privacy, only to find that it is forbidden from doing so by the T.P.P.

Groups that represent Internet users, like E.F.F., aren’t the only ones to have voiced concerns about the pact. In May, hundreds of small tech companies signed an open letter, posted to the E.F.F. Web site, expressing concerns about aspects of the deal that could harm their business. Online publishers, for instance, were worried that the T.P.P. would make copyright law stricter, thereby making them more vulnerable to copyright-infringement accusations. A leaked draft of the deal had given them cause for concern; it included proposals that would have the participating countries establish laws extending copyright for the life of the author, plus seventy or a hundred years—longer than many countries’ copyright laws currently cover.

The Web site of the U.S. Trade Representative doesn’t include details of the final deal’s copyright provisions, but it says that countries would “adopt strong copyright protections—drawn from international norms—to respect the rights of creators and establish clear protection of works such as songs, movies, books, and computer software, and to facilitate the development of new business models for distributing creative content that keeps pace with evolving technology.” It also noted that the agreement would include “an obligation that requires Parties to continuously seek to achieve an appropriate balance in copyright systems.” But without more detail, the tech companies remain concerned.

Most likely, these concerns hold for some of the big players, too—especially those companies, like search engines and social-media sites, that routinely post, or allow users to publish, parts of material owned by others. It might seem strange that these corporations have avoided criticizing the deal publicly, if so, but Danny O’Brien, the international director of the E.F.F., who has worked with tech companies large and small for many years, suggested to me that this could be because they preferred to have their lobbyists voice their objections in the negotiations, behind closed doors. He told me:

They now have access to levers of power that go beyond external public advocacy. T.P.P. has had no access for wider public involvement, but a big open door for companies. To walk through that door, you have to buy into the legitimacy of that process, and it’s the process that a lot of people—including us—are upset about. Once you’re in there: well, it’s a trade agreement. Behind those doors, they trade.

All of this indicates, on the one hand, that though the information-movement provisions marked a clear victory for the big players in the tech industry, the scorecard could be more mixed than it appears. But is also suggests that, regardless of what the details of the agreement ultimately show, the T.P.P. may mark another kind of success for Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies—demonstrating that, after years spent gaining access to places like Washington and Brussels, they now have more in common with the large multinational corporations that trade in tires and apples than with the startups headquartered down the road.