Trade wars, encouraged by President Trump, are inching closer. The White House has rejected the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an agreement involving 12 Asian-Pacific countries, including the United States, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam. It is threatening to do the same with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by slapping a 20 percent duty on Mexican exports to the United …

  It’s hard to quibble with the continued success of Google’s advertising business. Already the dominant company in the $200 billion annual market for web and mobile commercials, Google parent company Alphabet Inc. padded its advertising revenue by about $12 billion from 2015 to 2016. That means in a single year, Google found new business that was equivalent to half …

  The European Union is grappling with Uber and its peers, asking how best to regulate businesses that connect buyers and sellers in the so-called sharing economy. EU policy is shaping up to be much too heavy-handed. A big question for these new enterprises is whether the people supplying the services are deemed to be employees (with rights protected by …