16h ago

Trump orders trade chief to revive tariff retaliation against digital taxes

Digital service taxes a longstanding trade irritant for US
Countries including France, Canada, UK have DSTs
White House says it will scrutinize EU tech regulations

President Donald Trump on Friday ordered his trade chief to revive investigations aimed at imposing tariffs on imports from countries that levy digital service taxes on U.S. technology companies.

A White House official, providing details of the order, said Trump was directing his administration to consider responsive actions like tariffs "to combat the digital service taxes (DSTs), fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies."

. . .

The memo directs the U.S. Trade Representative's office to renew digital service taxes investigations that were initiated during Trump's first term, and investigate any additional countries that use a digital tax "to discriminate against U.S. companies," according to a White House fact sheet.

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3 comments

Don’t they (US) stand to loose more if digital service taxes get really implemented? The current version is quite small and symbolic. Other countries introduced this on a small scale but would all benefit from building their own digital service ecosystem shielded from the US competition: it didn’t happen at scale not to break overall business with the US but if the business is breaking anyway…

lmao the impending recession is going to be fucking biblical.

Digital services tend to be an area where the US enjoys huge trade surpluses. If that pandora's box is opened, it's going to be really bad for the tech giants when retaliatory steps are inevitably taken. I thought this was why Trump was trying to keep the tariff war focused on material goods?
I know in Canada, FB stopped serving news when they refused to contribute to a government fund to help the struggling domestic journalism industry which they were scraping content from with reckless abandon. Personally, I'm happy to see one less stifling algorithm-fed echo chamber. It's like a breath of fresh air.