Kathmandu. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that he will impose retaliatory tariffs on countries that levy digital taxes on U.S. tech companies.

When asked whether he would sign an order regarding digital taxes, Trump gave an affirmative answer.

“We are going to be doing that, digital. What they’re doing to us in other countries is terrible with digital, so we’re going to be announcing that,” he said.

“Though America has no such thing, and only America should be allowed to tax American firms, trading partners hand American companies a bill for something called a digital service tax,” read a fact sheet released earlier this month by the White House.

“Canada and France use these taxes to each collect over 500 million (U.S.) dollars per year from American companies,” the White House said. “Overall, these non-reciprocal taxes cost America’s firms over 2 billion dollars per year.”

In recent years, several European countries have actively pushed for digital taxes on the operations of large tech companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta in their countries, which has been strongly opposed by the United States.

During Trump’s first term, he initiated a “301 investigation” into the digital services taxes of several trade partners, accusing these tax measures of unfairly affecting American businesses.

After Joe Biden took office, the United States reached a compromise with Austria, Britain, France, Italy and Spain regarding the digital services tax dispute in October 2021, and agreed to resolve the issue under the framework of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s global tax deal.

But on his first day back in office on Jan. 20, Trump signed a presidential memorandum that the global corporate minimum tax deal reached under the OECD framework had “no force or effect” in the United States, effectively withdrawing from the agreement that the Biden administration had negotiated with nearly 140 countries. AFP