On Tuesday, May 18th, 2021, the United States and France signed the IGA (Interim Digital Services Tax Agreement) that ends the long-standing feud between the two nations over the taxation of American tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

Under the IGA, France will defer its Digital Services Tax (DST) until December 2023, and the United States will not impose retaliatory tariffs on French goods, as it had planned to do in response to the DST.

The DST, implemented by France in 2019, was a 3% tax on the revenues of tech companies with global revenues of at least €750 million ($900 million) and French revenues of over €25 million ($30 million). This tax was seen as unfairly targeting American companies as it applied to very few European companies.

The United States had threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on French goods and had launched a Section 301 investigation into the DST. However, the two nations were able to come to an agreement following the election of President Biden, who had pledged to work on resolving the issue.

The IGA is only an interim agreement, and negotiations on a global solution to the taxation of digital services will continue through the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). However, the IGA provides some much-needed breathing room for the tech giants and helps to ease tensions between the two countries.

From an SEO perspective, it is important to note that the signing of the IGA will likely result in a decrease in articles and searches related to the France-US tech tax dispute, as the resolution of the issue makes it less newsworthy. However, it is still important to include relevant keywords and tags related to the IGA, such as “Interim Digital Services Tax Agreement” and “taxation of digital services,” to ensure that the article is still searchable and relevant.