A lot of international trade takes place over the Internet, where digital goods and services are bought and sold across national borders. But international trade policy is still catching up. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation agreement the Obama administration hopes to complete this year, will contain new types of rules governing digital commerce in a bid to ensure governments don't block bits and bytes the way they've slowed down trade of physical goods with tariffs.

At the heart of those rules is an effort by the U.S. to persuade countries to do away with laws requiring data be stored on local servers. Leading that push is Robert Holleyman, a deputy U.S. trade representative and former software industry lobbyist. It's his job to head off the kinds of measures that make moving data harder and more expensive. Laws forcing data storage within national boundaries interfere with economies of scale, he says, much the same way that requiring automakers to use only domestically sourced parts would raise the price of a car. The continued growth of cloud-computing services from the likes of Amazon.com and Google will depend on having a multinational set of clients underwriting staggering capital expenditures. "We're trying to make sure that the costs of building and maintaining large data centers can be shared across borders," Holleyman says.