On 16 July, an article from the UN Conference on Trade & Development published an article which says that while customs duties were applied on the physical imports of these digitalised products, their online imports escape customs duties, this because of a WTO e-commerce moratorium dating back to 1998 when few products were digitally traded and only a couple of countries had the capacity to collect customs duties on intangible imports anyway. However, for developing countries tariff revenues due to the moratorium were estimated at $10 billion in 2017. A decision on continuing with the moratorium or not will be taken at the 12th WTO Ministerial Conference in 2021. The article argues that the covid-19 crisis has worsened the effect of the moratorium.
https://unctad.org/en/pages/newsdetails.aspx?OriginalVersionID=2430
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