A new deal on digital services trade between Singapore and EFTA states, including Switzerland, seeks to reconcile the need for privacy and security with the desire for innovation and growth in increasingly data-driven economies. It also shows that even coalitions of small economies can help set global standards in the new digital age. Behind our increasingly online world is a hidden realm of digital plumbing. And like the pipes, vents and valves of household plumbing, you only notice it when things go wrong. Amazon Web Services in October apologised after an outage at its giant cloud-computing centre in northern Virginia knocked out thousands of websites, as well as the planet’s biggest online banking, communication and social media operations. The failure – just the most prominent of many in recent years – shows the international nature of the data infrastructure and services that enmesh us all. In October Switzerland and its European Free Trade Association (EFTA) partners signed …