In 2026, the leaders of America's current and former trading partners will have to deal 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, regardless of the cause.
Fortunately for the political fortunes of world 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 industries of the most profitable American companies are all vulnerable to a simple legal change that will make things cheaper for billions of people, around the world, including in the US, at the expense of the companies whose CEOs posed with Trump on the inaugural stage.
In 2026, countries looking to win the trade war have a unique historic opportunity: They could repeal their “anti-circumvention laws,” which make it illegal – in many cases a crime – to change devices and services without the consent of their manufacturers. For the past two decades, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative—which is responsible for developing and coordinating U.S. international trade, commodities, and direct investment policies—has pressured most of the world to adopt these laws, hindering foreign startups that could compete with Apple (by offering a jailbreak 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 competing apps), or John Deere (by disabling the systems that block third-party repairs), or the Big Three automakers (by decoding the coded error messages that technicians need to service our cars). The revenues that American companies can obtain from these digital locks amount to hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The world's governments agreed to protect this racket in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Now that the US has reneged on its side of the bargain, these laws no longer serve any useful purpose.
US tech giants (and giant US tech companies) have used digital locks to amass a vast trove of ill-gotten wealth. In 2026, the first country brave enough to plunder that treasure will be able to convert hundreds of billions in American rents into hundreds of millions in domestic profits, putting its domestic tech sector into stable orbit—and the remaining hundreds of billions will be reaped as consumer surplus by all of us, everyone in the world (including Americans buying gray market jailbreak tools from abroad).
In 2026, many countries will respond to tariffs as they did in the 19th century. But a few countries will have the vision, the courage and the political smarts to kick Donald Trump straight in the dongle. The country that gets there first will have the same relationship with third-party game console app stores, for example, that Finland had during the Nokia mobile phone decade.
There are many countries with the technical knowledge to make this happen. Clearly, Canada and Mexico have pride of place, as Trump has torn up the USMCA agreement he arm-chaired them into in 2020 and bombarded Mexico with racist rhetoric even as he threatened to annex Canada. Speaking of annexation targets with significant communities of technical experts, the Danes could lead the EU out of the wilderness the bloc found itself in when they triggered 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 that saw Trump abandon the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), like Costa Rica.
