Italy may be abandoning a tax that has irritated Washington by issuing a joint statement on Friday against “discriminatory” levies on digital services with the United States.
In contrast to his colder approach of other European leaders, Meloni received a warm reception from Donald Trump during his back-to-back transatlantic meetings with him and his deputy JD Vance.
American governments, including Trump’s, have long been irritated by European taxes intended to target powerful U.S. internet companies like Alphabet’s Google, Meta’s Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.
For digital businesses with annual sales of at least 750 million euros ($853.35 million), or less than 500 million euros in state revenue, Italy levies a 3% tax on online transaction revenue.
“We agreed that a non-discriminatory environment in terms of digital services taxation is necessary to enable investments from cutting-edge tech companies,” Washington and Rome stated after Meloni’s Thursday visit to the White House.
The statement did not specify if Rome had promised to do away with the tax, but it did declare that Trump will make an official visit to Italy “in the near future.”
The Italian online tax is a difficult subject for Meloni, even if the policy only brings in a very tiny amount of money in a nation where total budget expenditures exceed 800 billion euros.
According to political insiders, parties in her ruling coalition want her to put more pressure on big tech to obtain the funds required to implement expensive policies without putting undue burden on Italy’s already precarious state finances, even as she deals with pressure from the United States.
Giancarlo Giorgetti, the minister of economy, stated on Thursday that talks with the United States over major tech taxes should take place bilaterally rather than via the EU. He also mentioned that he would meet with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at a G20 meeting the following week.
In order to help Italy become the primary regional data hub for the Mediterranean and North Africa, the joint statement also praised US investments in AI computing and cloud services in Italy.
Last year, AWS, the computing division of Amazon, said that it will invest 1.2 billion euros over five years in Italy to further expand its data center operations there.
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