Is the World Finally Going to Tariff Big Tech?

One of the pillars of the global economy fell a few weeks ago, and practically nobody noticed. The 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization ended its meeting in Cameroon last month declaring that, for the first time since in almost three decades, it had failed to reach consensus on a moratorium prohibiting customs duties on e-commerce.

It is worth noting exactly how long this agreement has lasted. It was in May 1998 that countries first decided that the cross-border “production, distribution, marketing, sale or delivery of goods and services by electronic means” would not be tariffed the way goods are. Back then, Netflix Inc. was a scrappy start-up, less than a year old, that mailed DVDs to you. Alphabet Inc.’s Google didn’t even exist. Nobody had any conception of what a cross-border digital transaction was, or how you might tariff it.