In 2026, the leaders of America’s (former) trading partners are going to have to grapple with the political consequences of tit-for-tat tariffs. A tariff is a tax paid by consumers, and if there’s one thing the past four years have taught us, it’s that the public will not forgive a politician who presides over a period of rising prices, no matter what the cause.
Luckily for the political fortunes of the world’s leaders, there is a better way to respond to tariffs. Tit-for-tat tariffs are a 19th-century tactic, and we live in a 21st-century world—a world where the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable US companies are all vulnerable to a simple legal change that will make things cheaper for billions of people, all over the world, including in the US, at the expense of the companies whose CEOs posed with Trump on the inaugural dais.
In 2026, countries that want to win the trade war have a unique historical possibility: They could repeal their “anticircumvention” laws, which make it illegal—a felony, in many cases—to modify devices and services without permission from their manufacturers. Over the past two decades, the office of the US Trade Representative–which is responsible for developing and coordinating US international trade, commodity, and direct investment policy—has pressured most of the world into adopting these laws, hamstringing foreign startups that might compete with Apple (by providing a jailbreaking kit that installs a third-party app store), or Google (by blocking tracking on Android devices), or Amazon (by converting Kindle and Audible files to formats that work on rival apps), or John Deere (by disabling the systems that block third-party repairs), or the Big Three automakers (by decoding the encrypted error messages mechanics need to service our cars). The rents that these digital locks help American companies extract run to hundreds of billions of dollars every single year. The world’s governments agreed to protect this racket in exchange for tariff-free access to American markets. Now that the US has reneged on its side of the bargain, these laws serve no useful purpose.
US tech giants (and giant US companies that use tech) have used digital locks to amass a vast hoard of ill-gotten wealth. In 2026, the first country bold enough to raid that hoard gets to transform hundreds of billions in US rents into hundreds of millions in domestic profits that launch its domestic tech sector into a stable orbit—and the remaining hundreds of billions will be reaped by all of us, everyone in the world (including Americans who buy gray-market jailbreaking tools from abroad), as a consumer surplus.
In 2026, many countries will respond to tariffs like they were still in the 19th century. But a few countries will have the vision, the boldness, and the political smarts to kick Donald Trump right in the dongle. The country that gets there first will enjoy the same relationship to, say, third-party app stores for games consoles, that Finland enjoyed in relation to mobile phones during the Nokia decade.
There are many countries with the technical nous to pull this off. Obviously, Canada and Mexico have pride of place, since Trump has torn up the USMCA agreement he arm-twisted them into in 2020, and heaped racist rhetoric on Mexico even as he threatened to annex Canada. Speaking of annexation targets with sizable communities of technical experts, the Danes could lead the EU out of the wilderness the bloc bargained its way into when they enacted Article 6 of the Copyright Directive in 2001. Then there’s the global south: African tech powerhouses like Nigeria, South American giants like Brazil, and the small, developed Central American states who’ve seen Trump renege on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), like Costa Rica.
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