Cory Doctorow just identified the inflection point no government has acted on yet: when tariff retaliation shifts from 19th-century reciprocal taxes to 21st-century legal revolution. Countries are about to discover they can repeal the anticircumvention laws the US spent two decades enforcing globally—extracting hundreds of billions annually in digital lock 'rents' from Apple, Google, Amazon, and especially Tesla. The window opens in 2026, and first movers capture domestic tech sectors.

The inflection point isn't that Trump imposed tariffs. It's that countries are about to realize they don't have to fight back with tariffs at all.

Cory Doctorow just made the crucial observation in WIRED that politicians facing domestic anger over rising prices have a much smarter weapon available: legal reform. Specifically, repealing the anticircumvention laws—the digital lock protections, the DMCA equivalents—that the US Trade Representative spent twenty years pressuring the world to adopt.

Here's the calculation: Countries signed those laws in exchange for tariff-free access to American markets. Trump just broke that deal. The legal quid pro quo evaporated. So why keep protecting a system that now serves zero purpose?

The answer is they won't, and the first country that moves captures something extraordinary: the hundreds of billions in digital lock rents that Apple, Google, Amazon, and the Big Three automakers extract annually from locked devices—iPhones you can't repair, Kindles you can't modify, Android devices tracking without consent, John Deere tractors you can't service without the manufacturer's approval.

Repeal anticircumvention laws and suddenly mechanics can legally jailbreak Teslas. Startups can build third-party app stores. Consumers can convert their Audible files to formats that work on competing apps. The rents don't disappear—they distribute as consumer surplus and domestic competitor advantage instead of flowing to US tech monopolies.

Doctorow's real insight is about Tesla specifically. Musk's valuation premium—the reason his stock trades at such a hyperinflated multiple—reflects investor belief in his subscription model: software features that expire when cars change hands, recurring monthly charges for features that used to come standard. That entire business model depends on digital locks working globally. If Canada or the EU or Brazil legalizes jailbreaking, Tesla drivers worldwide will buy gray-market tools. The subscription revenue collapses. More damaging for Musk personally: The overvalued Tesla stock he used to collateralize his Twitter purchase and fund his political operations loses that premium. The loans he took out against it suddenly underwater.

That's not theoretical. That's the valuation cliff. And it's why the timing matters desperately right now.

Canada has maximum incentive—Trump tore up USMCA and threatened annexation. Mexico has burned bridges. The EU could coordinate through the Copyright Directive reform Doctorow mentions. Brazil and Nigeria represent emerging tech ecosystems that could leap ahead a decade with one legal move. Costa Rica and Central America saw CAFTA renegued upon. These aren't abstract players. They have government interest in this exact moment.

The political logic is elegant: Retaliatory tariffs hurt your own consumers by raising prices on imported goods. Anticircumvention law repeal doesn't raise prices—it lowers them. It targets the US companies that funded Trump's campaign, not American farmers selling soybeans. A politician who cuts consumer prices while striking at Silicon Valley isn't conducting trade war. They're winning it.

What makes this a genuine inflection point rather than speculation is the timing cascade it implies. If even one nation moves in 2026—and Doctorow makes a credible case that Canada or Denmark might—others face immediate competitive pressure to follow. You don't want Brazil's startups building jailbreak ecosystems while yours remain shackled. You don't want your mechanics paying licensing fees to Apple while European mechanics repair for parts cost. The first-mover advantage is so large that followers act within months, not years.

This is what supply chain fragmentation looks like in the policy layer. Not new factories in different countries, but deliberate legal divergence. Countries choosing to opt out of the US enforcement architecture that kept them in dependency.

For tech companies, the window to adjust closes now. For governments, it opens immediately. For investors, the repricing signal is unmistakable: Any valuation premium built on digital lock enforcement needs to discount for 2026.

This is a policy inflection that hasn't happened yet but becomes inevitable in 2026—the moment when countries recognize that repealing anticircumvention laws costs them nothing domestically while extracting hundreds of billions from US tech monopolies. For investors in Tesla, Apple, and services-heavy tech, this is a material valuation risk with a clear timeline. For policymakers, the first-mover window opens immediately after inauguration season. For startups outside the US, this is the biggest competitive reset since app stores went mainstream. Watch for the first government statement on anticircumvention law review in Q1 2026—that's the inflection moment becoming manifest policy.