I can only talk about Germany, as this is the country I know best. I suspect it&#x27;s not too different in most others.<p><i>Most</i> laws are not passed after a long public debate in parliament, certainly not years (that would make for really slow legislation). In fact, almost all laws see almost no debate at all. As an example, just today the federal parliament passed a law without plenary debate at all and with no votes against to streamline electronic communication with the patent and trademark office. The law was introduced in November and voted through all required phases as just a single line-item every time. That is not an exceptional example.<p>Sure, these are mostly low-profile, low-impact laws so not really comparable to TTIP.<p>But extremely fast lawmaking is also not unheard of. For example, the &quot;Finanzmarktstabilisierungsgesetz&quot; during the financial crisis was first introduced to parliament and the public on 14th October 2008 and already went in full force by 18th October 2008. And that was certainly not your regular change of traffic rules but introduced hundreds of billions euros of liability. Of course that drew a lot of criticism.<p>I&#x27;m not saying everything went well with TTIP (certainly it didn&#x27;t). But if you talk to anyone in the EU commission they will tell you that they have been really caught off guard with the public interest which hadn&#x27;t been anticipated at all. It was not that they purposefully hid the negotiations from the public to reach their goals but rather did what felt natural to them. The EU has negotiated dozens of similar treaties (though smaller and lower-impact) with nobody voicing interest in the process.<p>When was the last time you heard about trade agreements with Singapore, Japan, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, the East African Community, Thailand, Morocco, India, etc.? All those are currently being drafted or have just been finalized without any public debate at all. Many of those contain clauses similar to the ones criticized with TTIP.<p>Of course we should ask critically why they saw it that way and hope that it will change in the future to more open negotiations. But saying TTIP was created in an exceptional never-seen-before process is really stretching reality.<p>Drafting the net-neutrality laws is the exception rather than the norm here learned after years of public debate on certain topics.