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One of the most hotly contested areas of trade policy is the idea of nontariff barriers to trade, often shortened to NTBs — or NTMs for nontariff measures.
This catchall term is most frequently encountered as a pejorative lobbed by one country at another when it disagrees with the others’ domestic policies that have trade-restrictive effects, even if their primary purpose is apparently neutral and serves a valid policy goal such as protecting the environment or consumers.
The classic examples of NTBs include quotas, licensing and technical standards like safety certifications or labeling requirements. Though these all have real benefits and legitimate justifications, they can also be designed in ways that exclude imports from specific countries or prop up domestic industries.
But NTBs are like the Loch Ness Monster: they are the cryptids of trade policy.
Many people swear they have encountered them lurking beneath the still waters of a facially healthy trade relationship, but no one seems to know how to prove they exist. Are these misunderstood creatures simply trying to live their lives and serve their own ends, or are they a menace designed to keep outsiders away?
Unlike Nessy, however, NTBs definitely exist somewhere, even if we disagree on where exactly they pop up. As tariffs shrank in popularity and were subjected to international restrictions such as multilateral treaties and bodies like the World Trade Organization, countries turned to other measures to pursue protectionist policies.
But what counts as an NTB is almost always up for debate. The line between legitimate regulation and disguised protectionism is thin. The photographic evidence is invariably blurry.
As the White House works to reset the entire trade landscape, tariffs are top-of-mind around the world. But NTBs are not far behind. In fact, they are already becoming part of the conversation at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
At the end of March, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a lengthy country-by-country trade analysis titled the 2025 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers. Jamieson Greer had just completed his first month as the appointed and confirmed USTR. He previously served as the chief of staff to the USTR under the first Trump administration.
This is the 40th edition of the annual report on foreign trade barriers, which not only examines trade in goods and services, but also electronic commerce. In fact, "digital trade barriers" are one of the 14 categories of barrier the USTR analyzes, explicitly including "barriers to cross-border data flows."
This is not an entirely new policy position from the U.S., which has always opposed strict data localization rules, but references to data flow restrictions have grown more prominent in recent iterations of the report. This year's report discusses data transfer restrictions with reference to China, Egypt, India, Israel, Kenya, Korea, Pakistan, Peru, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay, the United Arab Emirates and the European Union.
In fact, the report devotes a few pages to the EU's digital market strategy. After examining, in turn, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Data Act, and the EU AI Act, it discussed the General Data Protection Regulation under the headline, “Data Localization.” The section closes with an analysis of the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, mentioning “two pending legal challenges in the (Court of Justice of the European Union) against the DPF, one on administrative grounds and one on substantive issues.”
How the U.S. administration would view an invalidation of the DPF remains to be seen.
The focus on NTBs extends well beyond the USTR. About a week after the release of the USTR report and the day before the administration's reciprocal tariff strategy was set to launch, U.S. President Donald Trump's top trade advisor, Peter Navarro, penned an op-ed for the Financial Times, writing:
"Even worse than (tariffs) is the barrage of non-tariff weapons foreign nations use to strangle American exports, unfairly boost their shipments to the US, and wall off their own markets. These tools include currency manipulation, value added tax distortions, dumping, export subsidies, state-owned enterprises, IP theft, discriminatory product standards, quotas, bans, opaque licensing regimes, burdensome customs procedures, data localisation mandates and, increasingly, the use of 'lawfare' in places like the EU to target America’s largest tech firms."
The prominent references to data flows and data localization requirements are notable. Such mechanisms are clearly on the radar of those who are working to reset U.S. trade policy.
This week, Navarro framed the sudden pause in newly imposed global tariffs as an opening for negotiation with trading partners, reiterating the focus on nontariff terms. Quoted in Newsweek, he said, "What they're going to have to do without fail is they're going to have to lower their nontariff barriers, because those are the bigger ones than the tariff barriers."
Meanwhile, this week also saw the implementation of the U.S. Department of Justice regulations that most people seem to be calling the "data security rule," though the formal title is more descriptive, "preventing access to U.S. sensitive personal data and government-related data by countries of concern or covered persons."
As I've written before, the data security rule is a narrow but significant departure from the U.S.'s historically inviolable approach to the free flow of data. Yet the DOJ regulation occupies a complex intersection between national security, trade policy and privacy, so it could be that restrictions on “countries of concern” remain the one-off exception to the general U.S. approach.
At the same time, the new rules already have wide-ranging implications for any foreign access to U.S. personal data, with some effects felt by certain industries — such as health care and life sciences — more than others.
It is not out of the question to imagine such rules expanding in the future. Could similar restrictions be used as another reciprocal trade lever?
Such an outcome is far from certain. Equally likely in uncertain times is a return to the status quo: a hardline approach to the free flow of data as the U.S. seeks the removal of other countries’ digital trade barriers.
Please send feedback, updates and cryptid sightings to cobun@iapp.org.
Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, CIPP/US, CIPM, is the managing director, Washington, D.C., for the IAPP.
This article originally appeared in The Daily Dashboard and U.S. Privacy Digest, free weekly IAPP newsletters. Subscriptions to this and other IAPP newsletters can be found here.
