“The U.S. 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 upheld its opposition to a four-year extension of a global deal at World Trade Organization talks ​in Geneva which concluded on Thursday. However, Turkey, which had previously been against it, dropped its opposition, a WTO spokesperson said.

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, as business groups said it raised serious concerns about the ability of the ​organisation to set 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.”

From Reuters.