Big Tech lobbyists and their friends at the Chamber of Commerce are gambling that tech titans’ front-row inauguration seats came with a major party favor: They demand that President Trump revive a controversial policy started by President Obama that would undercut data security, privacy, child online safety, and right-to-repair policies enacted by Congress and state legislatures. Last week, the lobbyists sent US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer a letter urging him to enact the rules they had gotten President Obama to slip into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the damaging trade pact that Trump bashed all the way to victory in 2016. Their ploy is to insert into trade agreements enforceable rules unrelated to trade that lock in new rights and privileges for Big Tech firms and forbid governments from employing common forms of domestic tech oversight.
“Big Tech lobbyists are playing a cynical game.”
This includes forbidding governments from limiting where and how our data flows and where it is stored; requiring governments to provide Section 230-style liability protection for tech platforms; forbidding governments from requiring corporations to share algorithmic information and code, even when necessary to repair our own cars, tractors, phones and other property; and forbidding many commons forms of competition policy on which innovative up-and-coming US tech firms rely. (This final pro-monopoly trick involves labelling any policy that could have a greater impact on larger firms—because they are large, not because they are American—as a forbidden illegal trade barrier.)
It seems improbable that President Trump would choose to subordinate US sovereignty to trade-agreement dictates, much less expose state and federal law or executive-branch actions to international preemption by trade pact. But the Big Tech lobbyists are playing a cynical game. They have labeled their special-interest demands as a “digital trade” agenda. They are appealing to Trump’s conviction that the United States has been abused on trade by other nations with rhetoric about “our” Facebook, Google, and Apple being treated unfairly in other countries. They seem to hope that the president doesn’t understand that their demand to weaponize trade policy “against” other countries would also boomerang back against federal and state policies in the US that are supported by Republicans and Democrats nationwide.
Big Tech’s theme of victimization at the hands of foreigners, though not its specific policy demands, permeated a recent White House “Directive to Prevent the Unfair Exploitation of American Innovation.” It called on the trade representative to include a review of other countries’ digital policies in the much anticipated April 1 American First Trade Strategy plan, including “regulations imposed on United States companies by foreign governments that could inhibit the growth or intended operation of United States companies.”
That is pretty much the opposite of Trump’s statement when he nominated Gail Slater to lead the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. “Big Tech has run wild for years,” he declared on Truth Social, “stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”
But the policy conflict is yet more stark. Since Trump’s first term, Congress passed security legislation forbidding data brokers from moving our data to nations like China and Russia, federal agencies are requiring cloud-storage contractors to store certain data only domestically, and more than 100 right-to-repair, online privacy, child online safety, and other bills were enacted or are pending in 42 states from, Montana to Texas. The “digital trade” agenda being sold to President Trump as a means to fight against other countries’ policies would gut these American laws. If the Big Tech lobby gets its way, American law and national sovereignty would be swept away in favor of global “digital trade” rules.
Consider the data security or privacy policies that conflict with the proposed “digital trade” rules forbidding governments to regulate how data moves and where it is stored. In March 2024, the GOP-led House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill, the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024, that forbids data brokers from selling Americans’ sensitive personal information to offshore entities subject to the jurisdiction of adversarial nations to protect American national security and individual privacy. This bill was later included in a national security and foreign-aid package, which was passed by both chambers of Congress and signed into law in April 2024.
Since 2015, cybersecurity requirements for private-sector cloud computing service providers have included a requirement to store defense-related US government data from the Pentagon, NASA and other agencies on servers on US territory. In 2023, the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council proposed a new rule to require the same for non-defense-related government data. Additionally, a “Preventing Access to Americans’ Bulk Sensitive Personal Data and United States Government-Related Data by Countries of Concern” regulation that goes into effect on April 8 forbids the transfer of “bulk sensitive personal data or US government-related data” to a foreign country of concern, or by a national of such a country.
States have been equally active. My colleagues at Rethink Trade found passed and pending laws in 42 states that would be undermined by the Big Tech “digital trade” agenda. Montana’s Genetic Information Privacy Act, enacted in 2023, bans the storage of genetic and biometric data collected in the state in countries sanctioned in any way by the US federal government. Texas’s 2023 Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, requires digital service providers to disclose algorithmic information to third-party researchers, with an exemption for small businesses.
There also are at least eight states that have enacted right-to-repair laws covering everything from farm equipment and cars to motorized wheelchairs. There are more than 50 additional such US state laws pending that the Big Tech “digital trade” agenda would undermine by branding requirements to share digital keys, code updates and the like as illegal trade barriers that must be eliminated.
“Digital trade” rules would also thwart myriad policies to battle Big Tech’s monopoly abuses so smaller, innovative American tech firms can gain market access and create new products and jobs. This includes bipartisan proposals like the Open App Markets Act, which seeks to limit anti-competitive practices by app stores. Complaining that anti-monopoly laws target the companies with the greatest market share, Big-Tech-backed groups have furiously attacked a similar App Store law in Korea.
The idea that competition policies are somehow illegal and discriminatory trade barriers when a big firm is also a foreign firm has also been aimed at Canadian and Australian laws that enable media outlets to negotiate collectively with digital platforms. These laws address the power imbalances between news media businesses and the few online platforms that draw most of the online traffic searching for news. The “digital trade” boomerang aimed at these two laws would rebound against the US Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) bill, a legislative proposal that has bipartisan support and was introduced in the last congressional session by a group of 11 Democratic and 10 Republican senators.
Big Tech lobbyists have also deployed the “digital trade” discrimination claim to attack the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which passed in 2022 and includes rules that resemble popular proposals that Big Tech fought to derail in the US Congress. The DMA, for instance, prohibits platforms from self-preferencing their own products via their platform, as the American Innovation and Choice Online Act bill proposed in 2022 and 2023 did. Last week, in a letter spearheaded by Y Combinator, America's leading startup accelerator with over 5,000 technology companies in its portfolio, dozens of independent technology companies and their trade associations sent a letter to President Trump urging him not to attack the DMA and other competition policies abroad that counter Big Tech monopolistic abuses.
When confronted with the conflict between their “digital trade” agenda and laws enacted and pending in the United States, the Big Tech lobby claims that the rules they seek have exceptions that safeguard some policies. In fact, decades of trade-agreement rulings in non-digital contexts prove the contrary.
At issue is a fundamental conflict: Big Tech believes that binding international rules should prohibit governments from protecting their citizens personal data or sensitive government data by regulating cross-border data flows or data storage location, promoting competition and innovation with Big Tech competition policies or requiring access to the algorithmic tools needed to make your equipment operate. But most American voters and policymakers of all political stripes disagree.
That is why the previous administration stood against a prior Big Tech onslaught advancing the “digital trade” agenda. Given Trump’s insistence on national sovereignty, he should do the same.
We should not take the patriotic posturing of Big Tech seriously. Just last week came a whistleblower accusation that Facebook proposed to operate the platform in China in exchange for providing the Chinese government user information, developing plans for content censorship, and restricting the account of a Chinese dissident living in the United States. This follows on a shocking 2023 report documenting how Google and other Big Tech firms’ data collection and sales allow foreign states and non-state actors to physically track US defense personnel and political leaders as well as access potentially compromising personal information about them. The study found that Google had sent such data about American military and political leaders to people in China and Russia.
Yet, perhaps the real test will be when the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) mandatory six-year review and renegotiation starts. Big Tech lobbyists pushed for some of the “digital trade” language from Obama’s TPP to be slipped in when the first Trump administration was renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement to remove NAFTA’s job offshoring incentives. Since USMCA’s 2020 enactment, Congress and state legislatures have implemented needed Big Tech oversight that conflicts with some of these rules. Will the Trump administration remove international digital trade terms that may preempt our domestic data security and privacy, right-to-repair, and other digital policies? Will President Trump support the extension of a trade agreement that requires the United States to maintain—and other countries to adopt—the Section 230 platform liability waivers he passionately opposes? Stay tuned.