I have previously suggested that after three years it would have been nice to see some concrete proposals from the United States Trade Representative on what the US government wants on digital trade rules, instead of just the pullback from the data flows, data localisation and source code rules that we saw last year. That pullback was driven by a desire to protect “policy space”, so in this post I sketch out some ideas (not all of them mine!) on how US policy sensitivities could have been addressed instead of abandoning the rules altogether.