"Donald Trump’s tariffs demand a response. Around the world, that response has defaulted to retaliatory tariffs — a strategy with severe and obvious drawbacks. After years of pandemic shocks and greedflation, people around the globe have severe inflation fatigue, and few governments are eager to risk further price hikes. And while the world is rightly furious at Trump’s talk of annexation and other belligerent acts, that anger is unlikely to translate into popular support for higher prices on everyday goods. If there’s one lesson that politicians everywhere have metabolized over the past twenty-four months, it’s that any government that presides over inflationary price rises is likely to be out of a job come the next election.
Luckily there is another policy response to tariffs — one that will substantially lower prices for America’s tariff-clobbered trading partners while incubating profitable, export-oriented domestic tech firms. These firms could sell tools and services to local businesses, to the benefit of the world’s news and culture industries, software firms, and consumers alike.
That response? Repealing “anticircumvention laws” that prohibits domestic firms from reverse-engineering “digital locks.” These anticircumvention laws stop the world’s farmers from fixing their John Deere tractors; they stop mechanics from diagnosing your car; they stop technologists from creating their own app stores for phones and games consoles."
https://jacobin.com/2025/04/ip-anticircumvention-tech-trump-tariffs