UK’s Johnson moving forward with digital tax after Trump targets French move

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he will move forward with digital taxes on U.S. tech companies after President Trump planned to retaliate against France for making the same move.  

“On the digital services tax, I do think we need to look at the operation of the big digital companies and the huge revenues they have in this country and the amount of tax that they pay,” Johnson told the BBC Tuesday. 

“We need to sort that out,” he added. “They need to make a fairer contribution.”

The leader of the Conservative Party has vowed to add a digital service tax to its government plans if it wins the election this month. 

The tax would apply to companies that make at least 500 million pounds, or $640 million, a year internationally and would charge 2 percent of the total revenue earned from British users from April 2020 in a levy tax, the BBC reported. 

Johnson’s decision to tax companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon could put him at odds with Trump, who has expressed anger about France’s decision. 

France signed into law in July a 3 percent tax on digital companies’ revenue to start in January. The Trump administration has retaliated by threatening this week to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on $2.4 billion in French imports, including cheese and handbags. 

“We’d rather not do that, but that’s the way it would work,” Trump said Wednesday, according to BBC. “So it’s either going to work out, or we’ll work out some mutually beneficial tax.”