Canada’s renouncing his tax on American digital giants under the pressure of Donald Trump, a few months after India, feeds concerns about the future of existing or project taxes in other countries, especially in Europe.
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“Almost half of the European OECD countries have announced, proposed or implemented” such a tax within their borders, observes the NGO Tax Foundation which promotes such a policy, awaiting a global measure.
However, international negotiations have lead in the wing after a decision on Saturday from the G7 countries to exempt American multinationals from minimum taxation at 15%.
Enough to anger the Nobel Prize in economics Joseph Stiglitz, who has been campaigning for years for such a measure: “It is a question of knowing whether democratically elected governments can regulate and tax powerful companies, or if tech billionaires can dictate policies through political relays,” he denounced in a press release.
Who imposed such a tax?
France, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, Turkey, Brazil, India … A dozen major countries have set up, or planned a taxation of international digital companies in recent years.
The objective is to make them pay where they exercise their activity, and try to correct the tax optimization that the intangible dimension of their activity authorizes.
Generally this tax relates to the turnover of large essentially American companies such as Google (Alphabet group), Apple, Facebook (META), Amazon and Microsoft.
The taxation varies from country to country in terms of turnover and type of activity taken into account. This can apply to online advertising, data sale …
“Most of the rates offered or adopted are in a range of 2% to 5%” of the turnover of the activities taken into account, analyzes the Canadian Tax Foundation.
Most countries have implemented their national measure pending an international agreement, now considered improbable.
What it reports
This tax reports more year by year in most countries, according to statistics from the European Tax Observatory dating back to June 2023. Revenues in France, Italy, India, the United Kingdom and Turkey in particular showed constant progression.
The tax brought in around 750 million euros in 2024 to France, according to government statistics, and around 800 million pounds (almost 935 million euros) per year in the British budget. Italy collected 455 million euros in 2024 after 240 million in 2021, according to the press.
Conversely, while the Spanish government tapped around 1 billion euros per year, in 2023, only 303 million euros were generated via this tax, according to the La Vanguardia newspaper.
Threatened decisions?
Before Canada, India had already removed its taxation on digital in April, namely a 6% tax on online advertising services provided by non -resident entities, against the backdrop of commercial negotiations with Trump.
The question now arises for other countries: if the United Kingdom has already signed a trade agreement with Washington, London wants to go further and has always refused to deny that a suppression or an adaptation of this tax was in the balance.
The Spanish government has never talked about returning to it so far.
Italy no longer, but during a visit to the head of the Giorgia Meloni government in Washington in April, the White House claimed in a statement that it and Trump “agree that a non-discriminatory environment in terms of taxation of financial services was necessary to allow investments”.
A spokesman for the German government said on Monday that the abandonment by Canada of his taxation project “absolutely does not mean” that Berlin is going to do the same, when German leaders are thinking about a tax of taxation.
Questioned by AFP in April, the Minister of the Economy Eric Lombard did not plan to remove the French tax on digital services until the United States signed the international agreement under the aegis of the OECD.
But concern remains: “Taxes on national digital services remain vulnerable to economic and political threats, in particular from the United States, which have always protected their digital multinationals from fair taxation abroad,” the NGO Tax Justice Network reacted to AFP.
