By the end of April I was beginning to worry that the word “tariff” would be permanently burned into the screen of my phone, if not directly on to my retinas. It was everywhere. It was every other headline, launching a thousand opinion pieces and sending countless trade envoys hurtling through the sky to Washington. It became one of the most Googled words, and then one of the most abused, a stand-in for all sorts of things people didn’t like. We found ourselves trapped in a language-abuse hype cycle and the inevitable next phase is coming for us now, specifically for our wallets.
If it has not already happened to you, prepare for the word “tariffs” to be the new answer to your very valid question, “Why is this thing so expensive?”
Think of it as the new “insurance”, a word that used to mean a financial product. Now it is the go-to excuse for charging €220 for small children to kick a football round a community centre on a Saturday morning. Or remember “supply chains”? The esoteric economic concept that became the catch-all justification for Covid-era price hikes on everything from bikes to T-shirts to timber.
Insurance cost rises and supply chain disruption are of course real phenomena. We inhabit shakily constructed global webs of commerce alongside people who are increasingly litigious and, it seems, accident prone, crashing everything from their cars to 20,000 ton cargo ships.
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Likewise, tariffs will have very real impacts on our economy and prices. But experience suggests that it will also become one of those words customer service representatives fall back on when we notice their prices creeping ever higher. When an acquaintance recently queried why “made in Ireland” cooked chicken slices on sale in an Irish supermarket crept up in recent weeks from two packets for €5 to €4 a packet, the manager could only come up with “tariffs”.
The current evolution of the word tariff, a word that meandered its way from Arabic to English via the lingua franca of medieval traders, does not stop there. It has come to be a stand-in for all sorts of things those in the Trumpian orbit do not like. The White House decided that trade deficits were tariffs when it announced its “reciprocal” measures last month, lumping VAT and even technical standards into the same bucket. And just last week Meta declared the multimillion euro fine the company was levied by the EU for behaving like a monopoly was a “multibillion dollar tariff” on the company.
Since words can be anything we want them to be and nothing has any actual meaning, perhaps there are more economic annoyances that we can start to label as tariffs too. My vote for the next pet peeve to be thrown into the semantic black hole of “tariff” would be the hidden fees we pay to participate in the app-mediated economy. I am thinking of the charges that the likes of Deliveroo skim from my takeaway order, quietly retaining up to 30 per cent of the money I pay to the restaurant, on top of the service fees I see on my receipt.
The same applies to taxi hailing apps which take a growing cut of drivers’ revenue, to Airbnb, to the 30 per cent cut Apple takes in its app store. Even Amazon, the everything “store”, gets a substantial chunk of its revenue – about $140 billion in 2023 – from hosting third-party sellers and taking a hefty chunk of their revenue.
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The platform economy is one of the most profound economic innovations of the last two decades, with digital intermediaries now wedging themselves between makers and buyers, and skimming off ever-growing slices of each transaction.
Economists might refer to this as rent seeking, or if they’re feeling poetic, “tollbooth economics”. But writer Cory Doctorow gives it a neologism that better fits the mood: enshittification. It embodies the slow rot that sets in once a platform captures both sides of a market, enticing us with cheap meals and discounted taxi rides, before tilting the scales once alternatives have been bought up or priced out of existence. Platforms increase what they take and degrade what they give. They siphon an ever-growing cut of our monthly expenditure to the shareholders and venture capitalists who front-loaded all those discounts and now want their pound of flesh – or, to use the desanguinated modern term, “return on investment”.
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But enshittification is so 2023. This is 2025, and it’s time for a rebrand. What about the “platform tariff”?
There are many ironies here; that these fees are part of what is actually pushing up the cost of living, and that digital services remain the most lucrative yet teflonated part of the global economy, untouched by the trade wars (so far); that companies like Amazon have reportedly had to climb down from displaying tariff fees to customers under pressure from the White House. But the greatest irony is the attempt to twist European monopoly rule enforcement as trade tariffs, when the main reason platforms can extort exorbitant fees is their dominance of markets. Meta’s rebrand of its antitrust fine as a tariff is matched only by the US’s Federal Trade Commission denouncement of the rules that underpin it, the DMA, as a “tax on American firms”.
Trying to call platform skimming a tariff is of course facetious – not least because tariffs are taxes, and taxes are collected by governments, and go towards funding parks and schools and other public goods and services. But if we are going to start abusing the language of tariffs to describe random acts of economic unfairness, let’s at least aim it in the right direction. Because the most pervasive tolls in the 21st century economy aren’t collected at borders, they’re skimmed off our economy with every click.
