Trump’s Deals with Latin American Countries Advance Big Tech’s Global Agenda
Continuing the spree of trade agreements being negotiated by the Trump administration, November saw the announcement of four more agreements — with Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
As with many of the previous “agreements” announced by the Trump administration, including those with the UK, EU, Japan, and South Korea, these recent announcements of “framework agreements” are not yet binding trade agreements, but instead are joint statements that set out broad obligations for further negotiations. They each note that final agreements will be negotiated and signed “in the coming weeks” without any additional information about the content of those talks. Importantly, the vague terms leave them open to interpretation and unilateral enforcement by the U.S. government, including by using tariff powers the President has unconstitutionally arrogated to himself.
Each of these agreements contains concessions being pushed by Big Tech companies that seek to limit the ability of the Latin American countries to regulate the digital ecosystem in the public interest.
As seen in the Table below, Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guatemala have all agreed to provisions that stop them from imposing digital services taxes and customs duties on electronic transmissions. Argentina and Guatemala have also agreed to provisions that allow unregulated data exports and prevent enactment of competition and other regulations that Big Tech has incorrectly labelled “discriminatory.”
| Concession to Big Tech Demands | Country |
| No imposition of digital services taxes | Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador Guatemala, |
| Support adoption of a permanent moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions at the WTO (E-Commerce Moratorium) | Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala |
| No adoption of measures that could be seen as discriminating against U.S. digital services or products distributed digitally | Argentina, Guatemala |
| Ensuring unregulated cross-border data flows | Argentina, Guatemala |
Each of these giveaways follows the demands of Big Tech companies, including in comments made to the US Trade Representative’s Reciprocal Tariffs Report and successive National Trade Estimate Reports. We briefly examine the effects of these provisions below.
Digital Services Taxes
Many countries are unable to appropriately levy income tax on Big Tech companies, as these companies do not have a physical presence within their borders. Instead, they use Digital Services Taxes (DSTs) to ensure that these companies pay some tax within their jurisdictions.
There is currently no global agreement on how to tax Big Tech companies, not least due to President Trump’s executive order ending U.S. participation in international negotiations under the OECD/BEPS framework. Limiting the ability of countries to tax Big Tech companies can lead to unfairness in the digital economy, a transfer of wealth from smaller to richer countries, and a shortfall in resources required for many (particularly developing) countries to meet their developmental goals.
Cross-Border Data Flows
Countries attempt to regulate cross-border data flows for a number of reasons, including to ensure that domestic data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity laws can be applied to data collected within their boundaries. Without such rules, companies can collect personal data and export it to jurisdictions with low privacy standards, thereby avoiding domestic privacy legislation and, in the process, reducing the ability of individuals to control how their data is used and who it is shared with. In essence, Big Tech demands free cross-border data flows so that they can continue to exploit and profit from people’s data, without appropriate checks and balances.
Argentina’s laws require that another country’s data protection framework be deemed “adequate” as a precondition for data transfers. Their deal with Trump declares the U.S. framework as adequate even though the U.S. has no comprehensive federal data protection law.
Customs Duties on Electronic Transmissions
The Moratorium on Customs Duties on Electronic Transmissions (the “Moratorium”) is a WTO agreement that prohibits members from imposing customs duties on “electronic transmissions.” In essence, this implies that countries are forbidden from imposing import taxes on business-to-consumer and business-to-business transactions that take place across borders over the Internet.
The Moratorium has been controversial due to the lack of agreement on its scope and its impact on tax revenues, which can be important for developing countries. The Moratorium also prevents developing countries from using customs duties as a tool to develop their nascent domestic technology sectors.
In these recent agreements, all four Latin American countries have agreed to take positions at the WTO in support of a permanent moratorium on customs duties on e-transmission. This power play has disturbing implications for the future of the WTO, a “rules-based” and “consensus-driven” organization in which member states are supposedly able to freely advocate for the positions that most benefit their people.
Following debate over the extension of the Moratorium at the WTO’s previous Ministerial Conference in 2024, it was widely expected that the Moratorium would not be renewed once it expired in 2026. However, with the U.S. pushing hard and succeeding in forcing many countries to sign on to support the Moratorium, it appears that the agreement may indeed be renewed (if not made permanent) at the next WTO Ministerial Conference in 2026.
Anti-Monopoly Policies
Non-discrimination is a fundamental concept in trade law, which generally implies that countries should not discriminate against similar products or services solely because of where they originate from. This concept has, however, been twisted by Big Tech companies to oppose any laws or policies that attempt to regulate them.
For instance, a number of countries have proposed or implemented laws that aim to promote competition in the digital ecosystem. These laws typically impose pro-competition obligations on the biggest companies, regardless of their country of origin. However, these laws are being challenged as discriminatory because most of the dominant tech companies happen to be based in the U.S. Thus, non-discrimination provisions can be used to stymie regulations aimed at ensuring a fairer and more competitive digital economy, in the process hurting domestic innovation and technology development, while also reducing consumer welfare.
All Risk, No Reward
If these framework agreements with Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador and Guatemala are finalized, they will significantly limit the ability of the governments of these countries to regulate the digital ecosystem — to appropriately tax Big Tech companies who carry out business in their jurisdictions, promote domestic technology growth or indeed protect consumers from the unethical competition and data processing practices employed by Big Tech companies.
Worse still, these countries are unlikely to see meaningful benefits in return. Using the cudgel of tariffs (or, in the case of Argentina, bailouts), the U.S. administration has essentially forced these countries to surrender their sovereignty for very little. In these deals, the U.S. has only agreed to potentially remove select “reciprocal” tariffs on products that the U.S. can’t grow, mine or produce, i.e., tariffs that never served any purpose and that were harmful to U.S. consumers. Indeed, the day after releasing these joint statements, Trump caved to pressure over affordability concerns and removed tariffs on such goods for all countries, regardless of whether or not they had made a deal. With a decision from the Supreme Court (on the legality of “reciprocal tariffs”) expected in the coming weeks or months, there is a very real possibility that all of President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs will be deemed illegal anyway. And there is nothing that would stop Trump from instituting more tariffs on these four countries at any time.
These recent trade deals, as with all the others President Trump has signed, indicate the need for Congress to step in and hold the President accountable. Without public scrutiny over the contents of trade talks and trade deals, Trump will continue to wield his illegal tariffs to further consolidate his authoritarian power grab and benefit his buddies in Big Tech, while people around the world will be the losers.