The writer is special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, visiting professor of computer science at the Open University and author of ‘Picks and Shovels’
What’s a (former) trading partner to do? In Canada, Mexico and all around the world, leaders are trying to formulate a response to the Trump tariffs and they’re all landing in the same place: if US President Donald Trump tariffs us, we’ll tariff him. But tit-for-tat tariffs are the stuff of 19th-century geopolitics. Here in the 21st century, aggrieved foreign leaders have an exciting, digital countermove that could have a devastating effect on the most profitable lines of business at America’s most profitable companies.
The countermove, which could make things cheaper while removing the monopoly profits extracted by the most economically important companies in the US, is to repeal a highly technical intellectual property law called “anticircumvention.”