US and 18 WTO members reach consensus on not imposing ecom duties

The US and 17 WTO members launched a separate pact to avoid e-commerce duties after talks failed to extend the WTO's long-standing digital trade moratorium

The US and more than a dozen other countries including Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Australia on Thursday launched their own pact to not impose duties on e-commerce after no agreement was reached to end deadlock with Brazil, a document showed. Brazil had opposed an extension of a global deal at World Trade Organization (WTO) talks. 

Failure at a high-level WTO meeting in Yaounde, Cameroon, in March to renew the long-standing moratorium on duties for cross-border streaming and downloads marked another setback for the WTO’s role in setting global trade rules. The moratorium, agreed in 1998 and regularly renewed since, bars duties on cross-border electronic transmissions such as streaming music or films and downloading software.