In the nearly 10 hours that it takes a Boeing 737 to fly from Sao Paulo to New York, its twin engines will transmit a flood of digital data roughly equivalent to 15,000 Blu-ray movies.

That electronic Niagara provides a continuous readout on the jet’s performance, giving ground-based technicians a head start on unanticipated repairs and reducing costly down time.

This is a corner of the global economy where the United States is unmistakably dominant: the trade in digital services such as “big data,” cloud computing and streaming video.

Now, President Trump’s trade policy may be risking U.S. dominance in the data-rich industries of the future in a bid to protect the metal-bending businesses of the past.

China, Russia, the European Union and various nations are erecting barriers to the free flow of data that companies increasingly sell as a product or use as a tool. Those obstacles threaten roughly $400 billion of annual U.S. exports and the bottom line of companies such as IBM, Citibank, Federal Express and Visa.

To combat such digital protectionism, the Trump administration wants to “modernize” the 23-year old North American Free Trade Agreement to prevent U.S. trading partners from requiring that data be processed or stored within their borders. Such measures create the equivalent of gated Internet communities, hurting U.S. companies, driving up technology costs and crimping economic growth.

Although NAFTA governs U.S. trade with just Mexico and Canada, business leaders hope its digital terms will serve as a model for other agreements around the globe.

But the NAFTA talks are snagged over Trump’s demands for concessions from Mexico and Canada involving traditional industries such as automobiles, raising the prospect of an impasse that could leave U.S. companies without the new digital trade rules they seek. Trump has repeatedly threatened to quit the pact.

“It’s obviously clear that the Trump administration has a set of different priorities – autos, government procurement, etc. – that are designed in such a way that it puts everything else at risk,” said Nigel Cory, an analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Emily Davis, spokeswoman for the administration’s chief trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, declined to comment on whether the U.S. approach in the NAFTA negotiations could jeopardize digital free trade. But she noted that the administration had identified the subject as one of its objectives in the renegotiation.

BETTER RULES ON DIGITAL TRADE

In trying to update NAFTA, which was written before the Internet age began, negotiators are grappling with questions such as how freely computer data can flow across national borders, whether companies should be compelled to provide foreign governments the blueprints or “source code” for their software in return for market access, and whether third parties could be held liable for what others publish on their websites.

The United States last year enjoyed a $159 billion surplus in the broadest measure of digital services trade, including an $18 billion bulge with Mexico and Canada, according to Commerce Department figures.

More than half of the global U.S. services surplus – and nearly 20 percent of total U.S. exports – is linked to digital markets.

Mexico and Canada already have agreed to new digital rules in a separate trade deal, the 11-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Trump withdrew the United States from that pact in January.

“We don’t have great rules on digital trade,” Sarah Thorn, Walmart’s senior director of global government affairs, told a recent conference in Washington. “We’re just starting to think … about what’s going to happen in the next 10 or 15 years, as technology moves faster and faster and faster.”

FENDING OFF FOREIGN BARRIERS

For the United States, digital services represent both a lucrative export and an essential operational tool. Four companies – Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM – dominate the $90 billion annual global cloud computing market, according to a U.S. International Trade Commission study released in August.

Cloud storage is just one example of a business that did not exist when NAFTA debuted in 1994. NAFTA language allowing data to flow beyond national boundaries is needed so that other innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence and algorithms, can flourish, companies say.

But it’s not just Internet titans such as Google and Facebook that want new trade rules barring countries from discriminating against foreign providers of digital products or imposing customs duties on them. The financial services industry is also seeking NAFTA language that would bar a country in most circumstances from requiring that data gathered within its territory be processed and stored there.

“It is the ‘modernization’ in modernizing NAFTA,” said Kevin Propp, director of policy for BSA, a trade group also known as the Software Alliance. “NAFTA is silent on this set of issues because this form of the U.S. economy didn’t exist 25 years ago.”

The stakes were evident earlier this month when Amazon Web Services suddenly announced it was selling its cloud computing servers in China to its Chinese partner, Beijing Sinnet Technology, for $302 million. The U.S. company acted to comply with new Chinese cybersecurity regulations that broadened an existing prohibition on overseas data transfers.

Lighthizer, the administration’s trade negotiator, complained last month that Mexico and Canada were dragging their feet on including in NAFTA the digital trade language that they had accepted in the Pacific deal. They are unlikely to formally accept those provisions while Washington insists on a radical rewrite of the parts of the agreement governing traditional industries, analysts say.

The standoff is complicating a push by U.S. companies to secure trade rules that allow them to store data wherever it makes the most commercial sense – not divided into separate and duplicative facilities in individual countries.

Otherwise, the result could be a balkanized Internet, as trading partners in Asia and Europe favor their own companies at the expense of the United States, some executives say.

“It would be very damaging if we weren’t able to reach agreement,” said Christine Bliss, president of the Coalition of Services Industries.

FLOW OF INFORMATION EXPLODING

The drive for new trade rules reflects the explosive growth of Internet networks. By 2015, cross-border data flows were 45 times larger than a decade earlier and were forecast to grow another nine times by 2020, the McKinsey Global Institute reported last year.

“Flows of physical goods and finance were the hallmarks of the 20th-century global economy, but today those flows have flattened or declined. Twenty-first-century globalization is increasingly defined by flows of data and information,” McKinsey said.

Each day, for example, Rio Tinto mining equipment in the United States, Mongolia and Australia exchanges about 30 gigabytes of data with a central facility in Perth, Australia. That allows the company to save millions of dollars by deploying its gear more efficiently.

Yet even as digital devices and services proliferate, countries such as Vietnam, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil have been raising barriers to such trade: Eighteen countries block accounting, tax and financial information from transiting their electronic borders and 13 restrict the flow of digitized personal information, according to the technology foundation.