- We seek to develop appropriate provisions to facilitate the use of electronic commerce to support goods and services trade, including through commitments not to impose customs duties on digital products or unjustifiably discriminate among products delivered electronically;
- We seek to include provisions that facilitate the movement of cross-border data flows.
The Internet provides U.S. retailers and service providers with an increasingly powerful platform for selling their goods and services to purchasers in some of the world’s wealthiest economies, such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy. U.S. filmmakers, musicians, and software developers should be able to sell their movies, music, video games, and other digital products to Europe’s more than 500 million consumers without having to worry about customs duties and fees, or otherwise being disadvantaged, just because their products are delivered over the Internet instead of by CD or DVD. And European purchasers should generally be able to validate their online purchases of these items with an electronic signature rather than having to put pen to paper. Furthermore, free flows of data are a critical component of the business model for service and manufacturing enterprises in the U.S. and the EU and key to their competitiveness.
For more information on e-commerce and ICT, visit https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/services-investment/telecom-e-commerce.
