Trump Admin Threatens France With Massive Tariffs Over Digital Tax

The Trump administration announced on Monday that France’s Digital Services Tax (DST) discriminates against U.S. companies and that the U.S. will be responding to the digital tax by imposing up to a 100% tariff on billions of dollars of French products.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) said France’s digital tax “discriminates against U.S. companies, is inconsistent with prevailing principles of international tax policy, and is unusually burdensome for affected U.S. companies. Specifically, USTR’s investigation found that the French DST discriminates against U.S. digital companies, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. In addition, the French DST is inconsistent with prevailing tax principles on account of its retroactivity, its application to revenue rather than income, its extraterritorial application, and its purpose of penalizing particular U.S. technology companies.”