zlacker

I think the best way to think about this is that there are a number of human rights groups who collaborate on critiquing proposed treaties and other international proposals (at the UN, at WIPO, etc). The process tries to incorporate these critiques, as it does with other input (such as that from companies). While it's all real politik in the end, different states have different viewpoints and incentives, and having dedicated experts work with you to understand, criticise, and suggest language or positions is often useful.

In particular, a lot of global proposals come out of the US, especially around IP, so having a US organization say "this is what the US political situation is, this is how this has worked out in the US, and these are the lobbying groups pressuring the US to support this internationally", can be very useful.

I was EFF's international activist and later international director for a number of years. A lot of EFF's rhetoric is aimed at US lawmakers, and its primary USP for change, public impact litigation in the US courts, means that a lot of what you see is oriented toward American audiences and actions.

But behind the scenes, much more of the work than you'd imagine has a global side to it. This has been true since the days of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, elements of which were rejected by the US Congress in the mid-Nineties, then policy-laundered through WIPO into the 1996 Copyright Treaty, which meant that it had to become law after the US Senate consented to it in 1999. (Treaties don't need the support of both houses in the US). EFF and other orgs at the time learned the lesson that regional and international agreements can often be an end-run around local democracy or norms -- and that local laws (from the DMCA to the GDPR) can have wider ramifications on a global network.