Savvy countries will discover there’s a way to mitigate the harm incurred by Trump’s tariffs—and it’ll boost their own economies while making goods cheaper too.
The rents that these digital locks help American companies extract run to hundreds of billions of dollars every single year. The world’s governments agreed to protect this racket in exchange for tariff-free access to American markets. Now that the US has reneged on its side of the bargain, these laws serve no useful purpose…
Repealing anticircumvention law is a targeted strike on America’s most profitable companies, and it will have an especially severe impact on Tesla, whose hyperinflated price-to-earnings ratio reflects investors’ pleasure at the Tesla business model, which involves charging drivers every month for subscription features and software upgrades that expire when a car changes hands. Musk owes his power to the digital locks that keep this business model intact. If it were legal for mechanics all over the world to jailbreak Teslas and unlock all those features for one price, Tesla’s share price would collapse—taking with it the overvalued shares Musk uses to collateralize the loans he took out to buy Twitter and the US presidency.
In 2026, world leaders have a choice—to make things cheaper and better for all of us, or to fight Donald Trump with weapons that were developed in the Age of Sail.
https://archive.ph/xsqg6