According to the Commission chief, the EU from Leyen is available for retaliation in the customs conflict with the United States. Taxes for US digital companies are a way if the negotiations fail.
In the customs dispute with the USA, EU Commission President Ursula from Leyen is considering taxes for American tech giants such as Google and Meta. If the negotiations in the trade conflict with the US government of President Donald Trump were not satisfactory, there are many possible countermeasures, said the German of Financial Times (FT): “We are developing retaliation.”
According to the Commission President, one option is to introduce a customs to service trade. “For example, one could levy the advertising revenues of digital services,” she told the FT.
In addition, von der Leyen emphasized the validity of EU laws: the “inviolable” EU regulations for digital content and market power that Trump officers see as a tax for US Big Tech companies will not be taken back. The EU will also not negotiate the VAT, which in its opinion is the same as US sales tax: “These are not in the negotiating packages because it is our sovereign decisions.”
Kukies warns of hard measures
However, there is also resistance to too hard measures against the US companies. The executive Federal Finance Minister Jörg Kukies emphasized: “We just have to be careful with the digital groups because we have no real alternatives.”
For example, business representatives reported that there are simply no cloud or AI providers of the scaling to which one could switch, he said at a meeting with his EU colleagues in Warsaw. “You just have to calibrate very carefully where you are doing the sharpest,” said Kukies. It is very important to talk about how the digital power of the EU can be strengthened.
Negotiations want to lead from the Leyen
The conflict between the United States and the EU recently spoke up. He described him as a turning point in the relationship with the United States. “We will never return to the status quo,” she said. There are no winners, only losers. In conversation with the FT, however, she emphasized that she was open to negotiations: “I think it is definitely worth taking a look at where we can align our norms and standards to make business easier. So I’m open to it,” she said. “But we shouldn’t screw up the expectations too much, because there are often different standards because there are differences in lifestyle and culture.”
Trump had reduced tariffs for a number of countries to ten percent on Wednesday for a number of countries. For the EU, this means halving the previously announced customs set – and yet a significantly higher surcharge for exports to the USA than before. The EU had announced Trump’s pause to suspend the planned counter-tariffs to US products for 90 days.
