GLOBAL
TPP: How the United States Used Tariff Deals to Weaken Tech Regulation Around the World – Ethel Rudnitzki, Krisna Adhi Pradipta, Justin Hendrix, Natalia Viana
When President Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2025, he announced a new trade policy for the United States. “I am establishing a robust and reinvigorated trade policy that promotes investment and productivity, enhances our Nation’s industrial and technological advantages,” he said. This memo served as an opening gesture for lobbying actors that work to reduce export taxes and tariffs, especially those affecting Big Tech companies.
A month later, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA)—an organization that represents tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta—issued a list of priorities for the United States Trade Representative (USTR) on what it called “unfair Foreign Digital Trade Practices.” Each year the group sends comments for the National Trade Estimates Report (NTE). In October 2024, CCIA identified 395 “non tariff barriers” in 54 countries.
Taking advantage of the new government’s disposition, the organization reinforced its comments and demanded a “firm response” against measures from 23 of those countries, requesting the use of “all diplomatic and legal tools available” including “bilateral trade agreements or investigations under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act.”
The government fulfilled the request and by the end of 2025 included digital trade clauses on deals or frameworks with at least 10 countries, according to an Agência Pública investigation, as part of the investigation Big Tech’s Invisible Hand, a coalition of 17 media outlets in 13 countries co-led with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) that investigated tech lobby around the world.
Many of these agreements were signed as a result of the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, which ultimately served as a pressure tool to prevent regulation of Big Tech firms in these countries. Indonesia signed the latest such deal on February 19.
IISD: Data and Digital Trade Law: Balancing rules, policy space, and development – Marilia Maciel
As data becomes central to digital trade and economic growth, governments are increasingly challenged to balance the benefits of openness with the need for regulatory oversight. This paper examines emerging trade rules on cross-border data flows, their implications for development and economic opportunities, and the specific challenges faced by developing countries.
Many governments are at a critical stage in defining their data governance approaches, seeking to balance the benefits of open data flows with the regulatory space needed to pursue national preferences and domestic policy objectives. Trade agreements are increasingly shaping these choices.
Developing countries face additional challenges, as access to data and its benefits remains unequal and increasingly concentrated. They must navigate geopolitical pressures and the risk of digital interdependence being weaponized, while addressing the data divide and seeking to secure greater value.
ORG: Tech Giants and Giant Slayers: The case for Digital Sovereignty and the Digital Commons
The dominance of a few tech giants leads to vendor lock-in, inflated costs for government and businesses, and the extraction of value from the UK economy through tax avoidance and profit repatriation.
The country is overly reliant on a small number of tech giants for its critical digital infrastructure, which poses significant economic, security, legal, and policy risks, including to democracy and public debate.
The immense lobbying power of Big Tech distorts policy-making, leading to weaker regulation, anti-competitive practices, and a centralised, abusive and anti-democratic digital information environment.
A strategic shift to using and growing the Digital Commons — that is, open technologies — provides the most effective path to Digital Sovereignty.
This includes shared Open Source software, open standards, and open hardware, which can foster a more competitive and innovative domestic tech sector, reduce costs, and enhance security.
ASIA
Medianama: Australia proposes new levy on big tech to fund news, opens draft law for consultation – Rohit Singh
The Australian government, on April 28, 2026, released draft laws to introduce a ‘News Bargaining Incentive’ that would require large digital platforms to either pay news publishers through commercial deals or face a levy on their revenue. The proposal targets companies like Google, Meta, and TikTok, which have significant revenue and user bases in Australia. Public consultation on the proposal is open until May 18.
The proposal targets companies that run major social media or search services and have significant revenue linked to Australia. Under the draft framework, platforms with more than $250 million in Australian-linked revenue and at least 5 million social media users or a 10 million-user search base would be required to pay a charge equal to 2.25% of their revenue base. The base is calculated using revenue from previous financial years.
The charge can be reduced or fully offset if companies enter into agreements with Australian news organisations to pay for news content. The system also incentivises deals with smaller publishers by offering higher offsets for those agreements. Companies must strike deals with multiple news organisations to fully offset their liability.
Medianama: India’s tech sovereignty is built on digital dependence – Dwaipayan Banerjee
India’s computing history is punctuated by moments of possibility, each representing a road not taken. What began as a genuine struggle for technological sovereignty has mutated into its inverse: a technological nationalism that celebrates the very forms of dependence it once sought to overcome. Silicon Valley’s relationship with India epitomizes this transformation. It draws talent from India’s skilled labor pool and treats the country as a captive market for its products, cloaking this dependency in the noble language of digital progress.
India’s elite technocrats, in their single-minded search for technological solutions, did not recognize the depth of their own predicament. Their failure proved tragic in two profound ways. Firstly, their aspirations for technological sovereignty collided with the very structures of global capitalism they sought to escape, structures that proved far more adaptable and resilient than they had imagined. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, their technocratic vision missed the real requirements of genuine independence. By imagining that technological advancement alone could accelerate development while bypassing the need for deeper social transformation, they reproduced the very elite–mass divide that had characterized colonial rule, ensuring their project would always remain incomplete. In attempting to overcome dependency through purely technical means, they inadvertently created new forms of subordination.
AFRICA
TWN: WTO MC14 Outcome in Yaoundé: Tougher Battles Ahead for Africa – Sylvester Bagooro
The outcome of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) 14TH Ministerial Conference (MC14) that ended at almost midnight of the 29th of March, 2026 in Yaoundé, Cameroon, points to tougher battles ahead for Africa. Threats of plurilaterals to the integrity and very foundation of the WTO and Africa’s development demand attention. What makes these battles especially tough to fight is that they are fronted by some of the big western powers as well as one of Africa’s historical allies, China. For Africa to have any chance in these struggles, the continent must rediscover its historical unity and coherence, rooted in the imperatives of the continent’s economic transformation, invest in resilience to defend its interests and not play victim to the system.
WP: Trump administration’s secrecy on health deals alarms experts, governments – Adam Taylor
The Trump administration has spent the better part of a year quietly negotiating agreements with poorer nations as it seeks to scale back and reimagine U.S. foreign assistance for efforts like HIV and tuberculosis prevention through a new “America First” global health strategy.
To date, 28 deals have been negotiated with foreign governments, mostly throughout Africa. But in a break with precedent, the administration has refused to disclose their full terms publicly.
The veil of secrecy has frustrated partner countries and angered transparency advocates, who worry that billions of dollars in U.S. funding — money that’s intended to help combat disease — is being leveraged by the Trump administration as it seeks controversial concessions on unrelated policies in return.
Public Citizen, a government watchdog group, has brought a lawsuit demanding access to some of the administration’s global health agreements, arguing that the State Department’s failure to produce the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request is “unlawful.”
WTTLOnline: Greer Supports AGOA Renewal
The Administration supports a multi-year extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act trade preferences program, but is not ready to commit to the duration of renewal, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said this week.
Mr. Greer testified on the Administration’s trade agenda at a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday.
Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo) said a long-term AGOA renewal is a top priority for his committee. Ways and Means had approved a three-year reauthorization, but the Administration asked for one year instead. Users of the program say that at least 10 years is needed to ensure predictability.
RestofWorld: What you need to know about Africa’s first AI factory – Damilare Dosunmu
Africa just scored a major tech coup.
On March 24, Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa’s Cassava Technologies announced a partnership with Nvidia to build Africa’s first artificial intelligence factory. This isn’t just another data center — it’s a specialized powerhouse designed specifically for AI computing.
A severe lack of computing power has strangled Africa’s AI potential. The numbers are stark: The continent accounts for a mere 0.1% of the world’s computing capacity, Karim Beguir, CEO of Africa’s biggest AI company InstaDeep, had earlier told Rest of World. Only 5% of Africa’s AI talent has access to the computational resources needed for complex tasks, according to the UNDP. Even worse, Africa remains dramatically underrepresented in global AI training data sets.
The impact could be transformative on multiple fronts.
First, it localizes AI development within Africa, reducing dependence on foreign cloud platforms. For startups like Awarri, it means training and running AI models on home soil at competitive costs.
EUROPE
CNBC: U.S. ambassador to EU: Stop fining Big Tech – Kai Nicol-Schwarz
The European Union needs to dial back regulation of U.S. big tech companies if it wants to be part of the AI economy, the U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC on Friday.
“If the European Union is going to participate in the AI economy…They’re going to need data centers, data and access to the United States AI hardware stack, and you can’t over regulate and move the goal post on regulations and hit companies with huge fines,” Puzder told Ian King on CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition.”
The European Commission has taken a slew of actions to crack down on U.S. tech companies in the past year. Those moves have drawn repeated criticism from a number of officials in President Donald Trump’s administration.
Politico: British lawmakers warn of ‘glaring risks’ in relying on US tech
British MPs are calling on the government to formally recognize the security risks of the country’s dependence on foreign technology firms — including Donald Trump’s United States.
In a letter to Cabinet Office Minister Darren Jones shared with POLITICO, the MPs — including Labour backbenchers and opposition reps — urge ministers “to take action to ensure the resilience of UK digital systems in the event of threats of or actual interference by a foreign government.”
The letter comes amid wider rifts in the transatlantic relationship, with Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer repeatedly trading blows over the war in Iran. There are heightened fears that the Trump administration could use foreign countries’ dependence on American tech providers for geopolitical leverage.
CNBC: Trump warns of ‘big tariff’ if UK doesn’t drop digital services tax on U.S. tech firms
U.S. President Donald Trump has delivered a stark warning to the U.K., threatening to impose steep tariffs on the country unless it drops its digital services tax on U.S. tech companies.
The tax, which was first introduced in 2020, is a 2% levy on the revenues of search engines, social media services and online marketplaces that derive value from U.K. users. This includes several U.S. companies like Alphabet’s Google, Meta and Apple.
Speaking from the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump criticized those he said were seeking to make an “easy buck” by targeting American companies.
“We have been looking at it, and we can meet that very easily by just putting a big tariff on the U.K., so they better be careful,” Trump said.
“If they don’t drop the tax, we’ll probably put a big tariff on the U.K.,” he added, without providing a specific figure.
TheIndependent: UK refuses to back down on US tech tax despite Trump’s tariff threat – Millie Cooke
Sir Keir Starmer has refused to back down on Britain’s tax on American social media firms, despite Donald Trump threatening to hit back with tariffs.
The digital services tax, introduced in 2020, imposes a 2 per cent levy on the revenues of several major US tech companies – something Downing Street has insisted is “fair and proportionate”.
Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office on Thursday, Mr Trump warned the US could retaliate “very easily by just putting a big tariff on the UK, so they better be careful”.
But the UK has hit back, saying its position on the matter has not changed.
Asked about Mr Trump’s threats, the prime minister’s official spokesperson said: “Our position on that is unchanged. It is a hugely important tax to make sure that those businesses continue to pay their share. So it is a fair and proportionate approach to taxing business activities in the UK.”
TheGuardian: UK urged to deploy EU-style ‘trade bazooka’ against Trump’s tariffs – Richard Partington
UK business leaders have called on the government to build an EU-style “trade bazooka” to protect Britain’s economic interests in response to the latest tariff threats from Donald Trump.
As transatlantic tensions rise, the British Chambers of Commerce said the UK’s “inadequate economic security” was putting growth and jobs at risk.
The lobby group, which represents thousands of firms, urged Keir Starmer to take the lead in protecting Britain from external crises, saying there had been “years of neglect by successive governments”.
Geopolitical tensions, the impact of Brexit, the Covid pandemic, and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East mean UK companies are navigating an increasingly fraught global backdrop for international trade.
The US president last week threatened to impose “a big tariff” on the UK unless it drops a digital services tax that impacts US technology companies.
MSN: Google told to share search data with AI rivals in EU proposal – Max Ramsay and Samuel Stolton
The European Union proposed measures to open up key Google data to rival search engines, including artificial intelligence chatbots, as the bloc seeks to rein in the power of the biggest US technology companies.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, sent so-called preliminary findings to Alphabet Inc.’s Google to comply with the bloc’s flagship tech rules ahead of a final decision in late July, it said in a statement Thursday.
The proposed measures under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, or DMA, would give access to ranking, query, click and view data to enable third-party online search engines to “optimize their search services and contest Google Search’s position,” according to the Brussels-based commission. If adopted, they could entail opening up that data to Google’s biggest competitors in AI, such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.
NORTH AMERICA
NYT: Trump Administration Returns to Court for Yet Another Tariff Lawsuit – Tony Romm
The legal war over President Trump’s tariffs is far from finished.
A little more than a year after Mr. Trump rolled out an initial slate of punishing yet illegal duties, his administration is set to return to court on Friday to defend the new 10 percent tax that the president has imposed on most imports.
Mr. Trump announced the wide-ranging tariffs in late February, hours after the Supreme Court struck down the original, country-by-country rates that had served as the bedrock of his global trade war. To apply the new duties, he turned to a little-known provision of a roughly half-century-old federal law, which no president before him had ever actually used.
The result has been a familiar legal drama that may once again shape, if not curtail, Mr. Trump’s tariff powers. The president and his aides have insisted that their actions are legal, as they double down on a strategy that increasingly appears to be raising prices for U.S. consumers and businesses. But state leaders and small businesses have claimed Mr. Trump overstepped, arguing in two lawsuits that the president wrongly bypassed Congress.
TalkingPointsMemo: The Fix Is In: Lutnick Family Could Make Killing On Tariff Demise – Josh Marshall
Almost every article on today’s tariff decision includes, somewhere two or three paragraphs down, a note which explains that it’s unclear how or whether the federal government will issue refunds for illegally collected tariffs. The Court’s decision doesn’t address this. I’m not sure why it would really need to address this. The tariffs were illegal. The government had no legal authority to collect them. So it should be a simple matter for importers to go to court and compel the government to refund their money. But set all that aside. Is it really so uncertain? I’ll bet the White House is going to find a way to issue those refunds. Why? Because Trump insiders, especially the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have reportedly made huge, huge bets on the tariffs being tossed. They and their clients now, per a July report that prompted a Senate investigation, stand to make tens or even hundreds of billions on those refunds. Given that Lutnick is a primary player in White House tariff policy, I’m pretty confident that they’re going to find a way to issue those refunds.
How does this work? I discussed this in a post from Sept. 1 of last year. The gist is this: When he became commerce secretary, Lutnick gifted his sons his Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald. (In the link above I explained how they structured this handoff — which as a bonus allowed Lutnick to pay zero capital gains on the entire transaction.) Twenty-something failson Brandon Lutnick is now chairman of the firm. Brother Kyle, apparently another business prodigy from the same family, is vice chairman. Soon after Trump’s tariffs were announced last fall, Brandon Lutnick — no doubt in a totally, totally arms-length way — started buying up the rights to tariff refunds at about 25% of their sticker value.
PC: Big Tech Embraces Trump: How Self-Serving Big Tech Corporations and Executives Are Pandering to the President – Rick Claypool
Big Tech corporations and executives are engaging in deliberate campaigns to ingratiate themselves with the Trump administration, heaping excessive praise on Trump while going along with his unpopular and authoritarian policies.
The enmeshment of Big Tech and the Trump administration is undermining essential government functions and sacrificing essential public protections, prioritizing the enrichment of a handful of tech billionaires and increasing corporate profits over serving the broader public interest.
Among those ingratiating themselves with Trump are some of the biggest Big Tech corporations, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, and corporations headed by Elon Musk, including X (formerly Twitter), SpaceX, and Tesla.
Conservatively, Big Tech has spent at least $653 million to win favor with Trump and Republicans – a number that is expected to grow with future disclosures and as the 2026 midterms approach.
USTR: Opening Statement by Ambassador Jamieson Greer Before the House Ways and Means Committee
Service providers have also benefited from new market access. In 2025, the U.S. services trade surplus reached a record high of $339.5 billion. In all of our trade deals, we ask partners not to adopt or maintain measures that discriminate against U.S. services or service suppliers, and to address existing barriers to our services exports. Additionally, in our trade negotiations and at the WTO, the United States is pushing for permanent duty-free treatment for electronic transmissions so that American digital and service exporters can compete on fair terms globally.
The basis of this program is the National Trade Estimate, a big book of the unfair trade practices faced by U.S. workers and businesses. For 40 years, this report was merely compiled by staff, put in a drawer, and largely forgotten. But last year, USTR put the National Trade Estimate to good use to negotiate the Agreements on Reciprocal Trade and knock down as many of these barriers as possible.
Politico: GOP finalizing draft national privacy law that would preempt states – Alfred Ng, Gabby Miller and John Hewitt Jones
House Republicans intend to release a draft national data privacy bill within the next two weeks that would preempt existing state laws, teeing up a fight with Democrats over where to set the ceiling for Americans’ data protection.
The Energy and Commerce Committee draft, which would preempt roughly 20 existing state laws, largely mirrors Kentucky regulations, according to a person who saw it and was not authorized to speak about it. The draft would not allow individuals to sue companies for violating their privacy rights, potentially limiting enforcement to government regulators such as state attorneys general or the Federal Trade Commission.
Democrats support a framework that allows people to bring individual lawsuits against companies that violate their privacy rights and allows states to implement tougher standards, arguing it helps ensure companies follow the law.
AINow: Uber for Nursing: How Gig Nursing Platforms are Lobbying States to Deregulate Healthcare – Katie J. Wells, Maya Pinto, and Funda Ustek Spilda
A seismic shift is rocking the healthcare industry. Uber’s business model—the “gigification” of labor—and lobbying practices have made their way to healthcare staffing. Backed by huge sums of venture capital and private equity funds, gig nursing platforms are promoting a political agenda that limits public oversight of healthcare facilities, weakens labor protections, and exposes patients to risks.
Since 2022, lawmakers in at least seventeen states have introduced bills to recognize gig nursing platforms as a new kind of business model, one that should be regulated differently from healthcare staffing agencies. In an additional eight states, policymakers have already carved out platform work from certain state laws. In sum, efforts that would deregulate gig nursing platforms have emerged in nearly half of all US states.
Platforms such as Clipboard Health, KARE Technologies, Nursa, and ShiftKey are using new technologically infused definitions to advance old deregulatory arguments. These platforms are trying to convince policymakers that their business model is not that of a healthcare staffing agency, and that they instead should be recognized as a “healthcare worker platform” or a “healthcare technology platform.” By renaming their businesses, gig nursing platforms are following the path of Uber, which exempted itself from regulation in dozens of states by convincing policymakers that it was not a transportation company. This new categorization allowed ride-hail platforms to avoid responsibility for passenger safety, minimum wages for workers, and contributions for social insurance funds. For the healthcare industry, the stakes of this strategy are even higher. Gig nursing platforms and their state-level campaigns threaten the stability, working conditions, and value of labor for an entire profession.
LATIN AMERICA
Politico: Germany turns to Brazil as US ties fray – Nette Nöstlinger and Tom Schmidtgen
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pledged to deepen political and economic ties between their countries in response to the increasingly unstable global order.
Lula said Brazil and Germany would work together to establish more independence in a technology sector dominated by U.S. firms.
“We are interested in developing digital infrastructure such as data centers, high-performance computers, and semiconductors,” said Lula. “We no longer want to be dependent on foreign companies that enrich themselves at the expense of our citizens’ data—without any guarantees regarding privacy and security.”
Among the 13 agreements struck between Berlin and Brasília during consultations held Monday are declarations of intent on cooperation in defense procurement, quantum computing, and critical and strategic minerals.
