And go crazy: by putting up barriers to trade. In this case The focus has been placed on France. Trump accuses the Elysée of unfairly taxing American technology companies with its Google tax… a tax that also exists in Spain under the name of Tax on Certain Digital Services.
Trump has taken advantage of an interview with New York Post to drop this bomb just a few hours before The G7 meeting begins in Évian, France. In that meeting, Donald Trump claims that he asked Emmanuel Macron not to tax American companies. “Yes, they do this to all champagnes and wines from France.”
“The only thing Macron has to do is eliminate the sales tax and then he wouldn’t have this pressure,” he added. Senior officials of the French Executive slipped days ago that this debate (the conversation around the Google rate) would no longer be on the table, but their counterparts in the White House rejected that idea because “not be precise”, as precisely stated in the New York Post.
The American president refers to the “GAFAM” tax (the acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) that France introduced in 2019 and which taxes 3% of the local gross income of technology multinationals (which meet a series of requirements in terms of local turnover). The French legislature wanted to double that rate (to 6%) but the Government rejected this idea.
Spain also has this tax, but it does not collect as much as I thought
This Google rate is also still applied by Spain, so it would not be surprising if these threats from Trump also reached Madrid. Washington focuses for the moment on the French wine industry: to their wines and their champagnes. The US accounts for a fifth of French wine purchases annually.
In Spain the Google rate began to be applied in 2021. At first, in 2018, with Sánchez having recently arrived at the Council of Ministers, It was estimated that this tax would raise 1.2 billion euros annually. Finally, there was an early election (two general elections were held in 2019) and some time later, when the design of this tax was reactivated, the Government proposed that it would raise some 968 million with it.
In 2025, the year in which the State collected the most money through this Tax on Certain Digital Services, it was registered a gross income of 410 million euros. Until April of this year, Spain has collected 116.2 million euros from the Google tax, 19.4% more than what it collected in the same period last year.
The OECD urges a return to negotiations
Spain, like France, continues to apply this tax despite the fact that in 2021, 136 OECD countries reached a global agreement to balance these taxes. The problem is that of the two pillars that were agreed upon five years ago, one of them has not yet developed politically and it was the one that stipulated that countries could maintain their ‘Google rates’ until progress was made in this international tax reform.
Last week the director general of the OECD, Mathias Cormann, pointed out in the Financial Times the need for avoid a “piecemeal” approach with taxes on digital services.
In that interview, Cormann urged governments around the world to return to negotiations, after the historic 2021 agreement could not be developed. Maintaining these taxes in a fragmented way is “bad for business, bad for trade and investment and bad for growth,” he added.
