Map: Trump Administration Doing Big Tech’s Bidding in Targeting Digital Regulations Worldwide
WASHINGTON, D.C — Following President Trump’s latest threat of 100% tariffs on countries that impose digital services taxes, a new interactive map from Public Citizen illustrates the breadth of the Trump administration’s global assault on digital regulations and documents Big Tech lobbyists’ success in pushing this agenda.
The National Trade Estimates (NTE) Report, published annually to identify alleged “non-tariff trade barriers,” has been used in practice to target public-interest laws as obstacles to trade at the behest of corporate interests. The U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR) latest NTE Report continued and doubled down on its targeting of critical public interest regulations.
After previously reviewing and categorizing hundreds of pages worth of public comments submitted by tech industry lobby groups to the USTR’s public comment process leading up to the release of the 2026 NTE Report, Public Citizen’s latest analysis visualizes the hundreds of digital policies that were then targeted by the Trump administration in its 2026 report.
The findings show that digital policies were targeted in 76 countries – significantly more than the digital regulations targeted in 65 countries in 2025 – and illustrate a direct throughline from industry demands to Trump’s trade agenda.
(For example, click Pakistan on the map and see the five specific digital policy areas targeted in the report and the six industry lobby groups who complained about those policies in their comments to USTR.)
The policies under attack include:
- Artificial intelligence regulations, including safeguards imposing transparency and accountability measures;
- Data protection and privacy laws designed to prevent the exploitation of personal data;
- Competition and antitrust rules aimed at curbing monopolistic practices and promoting innovation in the digital economy; and
- Digital services and similar taxes, used to ensure that Big Tech companies pay a fair share in jurisdictions where they earn revenues.
U.S. trade policy is increasingly being weaponized to advance Big Tech’s deregulatory agenda at the expense of consumer protection, democratic governance, and the public interest worldwide.