Tomorrow, President Biden will hold his first bilateral summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Washington, DC. The visit comes nearly 15 years after the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) was signed, creating a historic economic and strategic partnership between our nations.

As a former trade negotiator for the U.S. government, I helped negotiate this agreement to further the United States’ and Korea’s shared goal of lowering trade barriers and strengthening our economic cooperation. In the years since KORUS was signed, I’m proud to see how much the U.S-Korea economic relationship has matured. Bilateral trade in goods and services has increased from $104 billion in 2007 to nearly $170 billion in 2019. U.S. exports to Korea today support an estimated 358,000 jobs. And KORUS has shown that government leadership can spur private sector collaboration, unlocking new opportunities for cooperation across the Pacific and benefiting consumers. 

Google’s experiences offer a great case in point. Over the past decade, we have partnered with great Korean companies to bring better products to consumers in Korea, the U.S. and the world. For example, we have closely collaborated with companies like Samsung and LG to expand access to innovative smartphones and devices for everyone. That, in turn, has nurtured a digital economy where developers are able to distribute their apps to global markets and grow their businesses. Just this week, we announced our newest initiative: Google and Samsung are unifying our wearable device operating systems, which will provide consumers with powerful health information and the ability to communicate on the go, while creating new opportunities for developers and device makers. We’ve similarly had great partnerships with other Korean technology leaders like SK, Hyundai Motor, Kakao, NCSoft, Nexon and NetMarble.

Today, the U.S. and Korea are at an important inflection point in our economic alliance, as our nations recover from the effects of COVID-19. We can reenergize our bilateral relationship by partnering even more closely on technology. The U.S. and Korea are among the world’s leaders in technology — in everything from smartphones and software to apps and artificial intelligence. These complementary strengths present an enormous opportunity for deeper collaboration. 

There is, however, still a great deal of work ahead to realize that opportunity. There remain a number of areas where collaboration would be strengthened by better alignment on technology and digital regulation and policy. As we have seen globally in recent years, unilateral attempts to regulate the digital economy deter trade and create obstacles for greater investment. Inconsistent regulations make it harder for companies to work together, increase costs for consumers, and risk fragmenting the global, open internet that both countries rely on.

That’s why we believe Presidents Biden and Moon should launch a high-level dialogue on technology issues. Such a dialogue would elevate the importance of technology cooperation, enhance supply chain resiliency and promote common rules of the road for the digital space that will preserve an open, free and secure global internet. This dialogue would also help the two countries jointly address challenges in the technology space that risk deterring trade in our sector and beyond.

An enhanced technology relationship would serve the two countries’ economic interests, including the thousands of American and Korean small and medium-sized businesses that rely on digital tools to reach customers and stay connected. And it's not just our economies that would benefit. Increasingly, technology cooperation is also at the core of our security alliance. A common approach to digital standards and mutual commitment to transparent, non-discriminatory, and interoperable regulatory frameworks would reinforce that alliance, while also enabling digital cooperation across the Indo-Pacific region and beyond. 

The U.S.-Korea alliance has endured because of our shared values and belief that we are best positioned to tackle future challenges working in partnership. Technology represents the future of both our economies. By putting digital cooperation high on the bilateral agenda and launching a technology dialogue, the U.S. and Korea can give new momentum to our economic and strategic alliance, propelling it for the next 15 years. 

Whether it’s a pandemic, climate change, or the health of the global economy, many of the problems of our era can only be effectively addressed by collaboration across borders. In an interconnected world, such collaboration depends on international organizations that bring together governments, the private sector and civil society. And we think technology can help.

We’ve recently seen how technology-enabled solutions like smartphone-based exposure notifications can support public health authorities in the fight against COVID-19, machine-learning models can reduce energy consumption, and AI can address cybersecurity challenges posed by hackers and spam.  We at Google are proud to be investing billions in R&D each year to innovate new technologies to help address the world’s biggest cross-border problems.

To be sure, our relationship with international institutions is a two-way street. Our development of new technologies is guided by multilateral frameworks like the United Nations (UN) Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. More broadly, we, like every company, benefit from the good work done by institutions ranging from the World Health Organization (WHO) to the World Bank in securing public health, strengthening the global economy and resolving conflict. And we value international organizations' ability to shape global agendas and drive multi-stakeholder consensus — like how the OECD is working to reform global tax regimes or the World Trade Organization is working to promote a framework for digital trade.

This year, Google’s plan is to accelerate our partnerships with international organizations on four fronts.

1. Slowing the pandemic and supporting economic recovery.At the beginning of the pandemic, we wanted to help people find answers by surfacing critical information and leading global initiatives like “Do the Five” and “Wear a Mask.” For the first time, we partnered with the WHO to run public service health announcements through Google Search and YouTube. This partnershiphas led to campaigns in more than 100 countries and has driven over 1 billion ads served (impressions, or views) and 115 million clicks to the WHO website, educating users about the disease and fighting the infodemic. In recent months, we’ve turned our focus to helping millions of people around the world acquire the necessary skills to participate in the post-pandemic digital economy, and we’ll continue to support digital transformation of economies and communities to ensure that we step back into a stronger, resilient and more inclusive world.

2. Artificial intelligence and innovation.Building off our longstanding support for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we will continue to work with UN agencies to develop AI in a way that meaningfully improves people’s lives. For example, we’ve partnered with the UN World Food Programme to develop an AI-enabled tool to improve the delivery of disaster aid, and with UN-ESCAP and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities to launch an AI for Social Good report. We believe AI can be a transformational tool to support the goals of multilateral institutions.

3. Sustainability.Sustainability has been a core Google value since our founding. Now in our third decade of climate action, we’re working to help fulfill the vision of the UN SDGs and the Paris Agreement, becoming the largest annual corporate purchaser of renewable energy andcommitting to operate 24/7 on carbon-free energy by 2030. But we are also taking action far beyond our own operations, working with international organizations like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to create tools like the Environmental Insights Explorer and our breakthrough AI for building energy efficiency that help everyone move towards a carbon-free world.

4. Open internet and human rights. The advent of the internet a generation ago fast-tracked human rights around the world in a way history had never seen. Google's commitment to human rights, including to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, dates back to our earliest years. Cognizant of the alarming realities behind the gendered impact of the pandemic, we have had a particular focus on gender equality. That's why Google joined the Generation Equality Forum as a member of the Action Coalition for Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality; our Ad Grants partnership with UN Women has already enabled over seven million public service announcements in over 237 countries, raising awareness of the outsized impact of COVID-19 on women and girls. This year we also launched the Google.org Impact Challenge for Women and Girls, a first-of-its-kind program to empower women and girls to reach their full economic potential.

While we accelerate our work in these four areas, Google is committed to supporting international organizations to tackle the next generation of cross-border challenges that lay over the horizon. In an era of growing skepticism of government institutions, that starts by rebuilding trust and consensus in the value of working globally to solve problems.

As a technology company inspired by the power of human resilience, we can think of no better way to honor the setbacks, sacrifices and hardships of a battle-wearied world than to work with organizations committed to helping everyone — and doing our part by building the tools and technologies to make their vision possible.

Two decades ago, countries saw global trade in technology goods and services as an on-ramp to the economy of the 21st century. International agreements to eliminate barriers to trade in technology goods and services helped enable dramatic increases in technology trade, while countries looked to promote foreign investment in the cutting-edge technologies of the future.  Consumers everywhere got access to new, lower-priced technology, millions of jobs were created and businesses from Paris to Pittsburgh have been able to reach new customers around the world, generating trillions of dollars in sales.

Times have changed: We’re all using digital tools, and recognizing the risks of abuse and the need for responsible innovation. But while well-crafted regulation can help unlock the benefits of technology, an explosion in national policies is detering trade in technology. Those barriers include not just tariffs (which have also beset other sectors), but also trade controls, discriminatory taxes, investment restrictions and novel digital regulations aimed straight at foreign-headquartered companies. In short, we’re seeing the erosion of a carefully nurtured global trading system that has contributed to progress and prosperity in the U.S. and around the world.  

This erosion of trade norms isn’t limited to the U.S.-China relationship. Even more concerningly, the technology trade relationship between the U.S. and Europe — once one of the closest in the world — is fraying.  

In Washington, in recent years, “transatlantic tech policy” has been largely reduced to pressing Europe to follow U.S. supply chain initiatives. Meanwhile Europe has undertaken a broad series of unilateral initiatives in areas ranging from digital taxes to market regulation. Transatlantic coordination has largely become an afterthought, if it’s thought of at all. 

These policy trends hurt both the U.S. and European economies, risking the 16 million jobs on both sides of the Atlantic linked to transatlantic trade and investment. They also make it harder for the U.S. and the EU to address new global technology challenges and partner with emerging economies in Asia.

But there’s a better path forward. Coming out of the pandemic, with new momentum behind bilateral cooperation, we have a chance to revitalize the transatlantic technology trade relationship.

The European Commission recently proposed an EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC).  The United States should accept the invitation — and build on it. An expedited high-level trade dialogue on technology issues is critical to avoid unilateral approaches on pressing issues like data flows that are essential to commerce, regulation of digital platforms that we all use every day, and other essential components of a modern economy. A TTC could also prevent divergence on emerging areas like artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies and promote cooperation on third-country technology challenges. 

Of course a TTC needs to be set up for success. When entering trade negotiations, each side typically avoids preemptive or unilateral actions that might foreclose meaningful alignment. In entering a TTC, both sides should commit to meaningful consultation before taking any further actions harming transatlantic tech trade. The U.S. should not enact new privacy or technology trade control regulations without consulting with the EU; the EU should pursue bilateral consultation to ensure technology initiatives like the Digital Markets Act reflect the EU-U.S. values-based alliance. Quickly forming a TTC can help drive a consistent and non-discriminatory approach on these challenging new areas of technology regulation.

The need for alignment has never been greater or more urgent. An aligned approach will promote more tech-enabled economic growth; tech-supported measures to tackle other shared challenges like climate change; and new norms to ensure that technology will — in the words of  U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken — “protect your privacy, make the world safer and healthier, and make democracies more resilient.” 

For several years, governments around the world have been meeting at the OECD to reform the international corporate tax system. Not surprisingly, success hasn’t come quickly. This isn’t an easy task – but it remains a critical one. As the world economy seeks to recover from the global pandemic and governments face new fiscal pressures, an agreed solution is needed now more than ever to ensure a durable framework for cross-border trade and investment.

Tomorrow’s meeting of G20 finance ministers represents an important opportunity to give this process new momentum. For the new Biden Administration, the meeting represents a chance to underscore its commitment to the OECD-led multilateral process and to fair, comprehensive, and coordinated changes to corporate tax policies. And it represents an equally important opportunity for finance ministers from France, the UK, India, Indonesia, and other leading economies to commit to end the headlong rush to discriminatory tax measures that we’ve seen in recent years and work with the U.S. on a durable agreement.

The central question is less about how much corporate income tax companies pay than where they pay it. For Google’s part, our effective tax rate over the past decade has exceeded 20% of our profits, in line with average statutory tax rates. While we’re one of the largest corporate taxpayers in the world, roughly 80% of our corporate income tax has been due in the United States, where Google was founded and where most of our products are developed. The concentration of our tax obligations in our home market mirrors many other multinational companies spanning various industries and countries; foreign firms operating in the U.S. and other countries, for example, also pay the majority of their corporate income taxes in their home countries.

These tax practices are the product of international rules – specifically, international tax treaties that historically have attributed a smaller share of profits to the countries where products and services are consumed, leaving the bulk of taxing rights to the countries where products and services are created.

We have long supported efforts to update international tax rules to arrive at a system where more taxing rights are shifted to countries where products and services are consumed. So, U.S. exports, including a range of technologies, might incur more income tax abroad, while foreign companies exporting to the U.S. would pay more to the U.S. public purse. Like any good agreement, this will require a healthy amount of give-and-take.

Unfortunately, in the absence of multilateral consensus, the world has seen the growth in recent years of taxes targeted at foreign companies. Most prominently, we have seen the growth of so-called “digital services taxes” that aim to raise revenue from a small subset of firms, narrowly defined by revenue thresholds and business models. This selective approach has sparked tensions between the U.S. and some of its allies, pushing countries toward trade disputes that could further damage fragile economies.

Some of the countries imposing these targeted taxes claim they help build momentum for broader international tax reform. But these digital services taxes are complicating efforts to reach a balanced agreement that works for all countries – they’re simply laying claim to income that would otherwise be taxed in the U.S. We encourage these governments to roll back what are essentially tariffs or, at a minimum, suspend them while negotiations continue.

The next few months will test commitments countries have made to reinvigorate international cooperation. Left on the current trajectory, tax discord could quickly yield beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism that would weaken cooperation on many issues. But serious steps forward – starting with the rescission or suspension of existing unilateral taxes – could create new momentum for multilateralism, supporting collaboration on many other important fronts. We urge countries to work together on this critical project, building a firmer foundation for international cooperation in the 21st Century.