Since the November 2024 US presidential election, trade and tariffs have become a global topic of discussion. While tariffs have dominated the chatter, other aspects of President Donald Trump’s economic policy, especially digital trade, have received far less attention.
In recent decades, the Republicans defined themselves as the party of free trade. However, Trump-era policies challenged this long-standing position. Despite this shift, much of the party has remained committed to the “free trade” agenda championed by its primary donors, including Wall Street, major agribusinesses, energy conglomerates and global manufacturing firms.
Adding to this dynamic, Elon Musk’s influence and proximity to Trump — combined with post-election visits from tech company CEOs to Trump’s Florida residence and a wave of million-dollar donations by tech CEOs to Trump’s inauguration fund — amplified calls from tech and trade lobbies for an offensive digital trade policy promoting big tech’s winner-takes-all business model, exploiting market power through unfettered data collection and commodification. Some commentators even went so far as to urge the president-elect to “finish what he started” in an attempt to attribute the origin of the digital trade agenda to his administration, disregarding the historical record.
Unless one adopts a revisionist view, it is clear that President Barack Obama, not Trump, was the true architect of this agenda. E-commerce rules, later rebranded as digital trade rules, were first promoted as “21st-century high standards” under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Immediately after taking office in 2017, Trump announced the United States would not enact the TPP, challenging the neoliberal trade order rooted in “free market” policies that had led to oligopolistic corporate economies. Because the TPP required approval by countries representing a certain percentage of its market to take effect, Trump’s move meant the accord could not be enacted among the remaining bloc.
The other TPP countries overcame this problem by establishing a “new” agreement, or at least renaming a deal that still included many of the TPP’s US-crafted and negotiated free trade rules, and giving it a new mechanism for going into legal effect. These rules, now contained in the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), shaped the global trade era in the years to come, including certain aspects of Trump’s own trade policies. Under his administration, Obama’s e-commerce chapter of the TPP, largely carried forward in the CPTPP, quietly became the “Trump” digital trade agenda.
At that time, digital trade drew little attention from the Trump administration, Congress and the public. Meanwhile, tech companies successfully kept their pre-emptive digital trade agenda low profile, avoided public scrutiny, and worked behind the scenes to strengthen their surveillance-capitalist order in trade agreements. As a result, the digital trade chapter of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which built on the TPP’s e-commerce provisions, included some of the most tech-friendly and neoliberal rules on digital trade — rules that consolidate markets and extract profits at the expense of most businesses, workers and consumers. This agenda was later advanced as a global template for digital trade talks by several CPTPP member countries: Australia, Japan and Singapore — improbably, with Trump administration support.
But that was 2018, a different era. Trump was still new to the White House and Washington politics, largely unaware of tech monopolies and their growing power and influence. There was a lack of consensus around public opinion and a disconnect between tech power and trade rules. By 2020, Trump’s Department of Justice (DoJ) filed a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Google, taking on one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies. A few months later, his Federal Trade Commission (FTC), joined by 40 states, sued Facebook for stifling competition.
Having Musk in the mix adds another layer of complexity, as his influence on tech-related policies could be significant, particularly given his previous criticism of what he considered the FTC’s overreach.
More recently, Trump appointed Gail Slater to lead the DoJ’s antitrust division in his incoming administration. In a post on his social media platform announcing the posting, Slater criticized tech companies for stifling competition, exploiting their market power, and infringing the rights of both Americans and smaller tech companies.
The appointment of Slater, a well-known and respected lawyer in antitrust circles, signals that antitrust efforts related to big tech are likely to continue under a second Trump administration. However, whether the second Trump administration will be as aggressive as the Biden administration remains uncertain. While there appears to be interest in addressing big tech’s unprecedented dominance over the American economy, other sectors, such as banking and airlines, are likely to receive far less scrutiny.
Congressional Republicans, particularly the so-called establishment, have shown little enthusiasm for such efforts, given their corporate-friendly stance. In contrast, VP-elect J. D. Vance, a vocal critic of corporate power and neoliberalism, has praised Biden’s FTC chief, Lina Khan, for her work at the commission. As noted above, having Musk in the mix adds another layer of complexity, as his influence on tech-related policies could be significant, particularly given his previous criticism of what he considered the FTC’s overreach. This dynamic suggests that antitrust enforcement could become a battleground between establishment Republicans, Musk and the MAGA (Make America Great Again) wing of the administration.
This battle also extends to digital trade policy. The Biden administration adopted a whole-of-government approach to competition, treating trade policy as one of the tools to address the unprecedented growth of tech power. Combined with Biden’s post-neoliberal “worker-centered” trade policy, designed to place working people and the middle class at the core of the country’s trade agenda, this approach acknowledged that what benefits the largest American companies does not necessarily benefit American workers, consumers, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This shift led to a departure from the Obama-era neoliberal digital trade agenda.
After not including the Obama-model TPP-USMCA digital trade terms in its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, the United States announced in October 2023 that it would not support some of the more controversial Obama-style TPP-USMCA digital trade proposals at the Joint Statement Initiative negotiations involving 90 nations in Geneva. Biden administration officials announced that this would allow Congress and regulators to take the lead in curbing tech power, rather than pre-empting future rules and regulations through trade agreements that dictate what domestic policy makers can and cannot do.
In this context, Trump’s incoming US Trade Representative (USTR), Jamieson Greer, has a critical role to play. The administration’s approach to tech and tech power will shape that role. Under the neoliberal scenario, Trump’s USTR would follow the lead of tech companies, neoliberal free traders, and tech and trade lobbyists — championing the digital trade agenda crafted during the Obama era, the last peak of neoliberal trade. This approach would ignore the evolving role of technology in our lives, the anti-competitive practices of big tech, and the prospective harms posed by the ongoing unchecked power of these companies and their constructed narrative on digital trade, driven by neoliberal forces.
Nevertheless, Greer is not a neoliberal free trader. He is a well-known and respected trade lawyer who worked closely with former USTR Robert Lighthizer at the USTR, supporting the latter’s efforts to dismantle the long-established neoliberal trade agenda. It would be surprising for him to align with the die-hard free traders and champion a neoliberal digital trade agenda disconnected from the administration’s antitrust efforts and based on the flawed narrative that what benefits American tech companies automatically benefits Americans and small businesses.
Moreover, Trump has appointed Peter Navarro as a top trade adviser for his incoming administration. Navarro, a loyalist in Trump’s first term, explicitly identifies Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs as champions of the neoliberal trade order in his Project 2025 chapter on “The Case for Fair Trade.” In this context, it may be wishful thinking by big tech lobbyists to expect the Trump administration to revert to the 2018 USMCA digital trade rules. Such a move would overlook the growing power and influence of tech companies, the need for accountability and responsibility in the digital economy, the interests of Americans and the significance of giving SMEs a fighting chance.
In fact, the arguments surrounding “American innovation,” which have increasingly become synonymous with the big tech business model driven by winner-takes-all market dynamics that protect only the big players, are no longer sustainable. The concept of data free flows, where data flows into China but not out, positions China as one of the biggest beneficiaries of data free flows and challenges the notion of fair trade. Similarly, bans on local data storage and processing raise significant national security risks, particularly given the data broker business model, which sells national security-sensitive data to the highest bidder, including foreign adversaries. Since the last Trump administration, Congress has passed new data broker legislation that explicitly forbids American data from being moved to China and other “countries of concern.”
The neoliberal free-trade narrative of crafting trade rules for China — where China is either not a party or, if it is, likely to disregard the rules, if history is any guide — while empowering tech companies, compromising Americans’ rights and interests, and shutting out small businesses and little tech is unlikely to resonate with this administration.
A new narrative and fresh thinking around digital trade, moving beyond the “making rules for China to disregard” argument, are essential. Time will tell how Trump’s digital trade agenda will evolve. Ideally, it will carry forward the US break from neoliberalism, rather than revert to outdated paradigms that empower tech companies and cover up their monopolistic practices.
