EU Weighs Widening Corporate Levy to Reach Apple, Meta and Google, Six Officials Tell FT

The European Commission is looking at a way to collect more money from Apple, Meta and Google without writing their names into law. The Financial Times reported the plan on Wednesday, Oct. 7, citing six EU officials with knowledge of the discussions.

How the levy works now

The vehicle is the Corporate Resource for Europe, or CORE. The Commission proposed it in July 2025 as part of a roughly €2 trillion EU budget plan for 2028 to 2034.

As written, CORE hits any company with annual EU net revenue above €100 million with a flat yearly payment of between €100,000 and €750,000. For a multinational, that is small change. Tech Times, citing Apple's fiscal 2025 results, put the company's European net sales at about $111 billion.

The change under discussion would raise those payment brackets substantially. No new figures have been confirmed.

The stated logic

One EU official put the reasoning to the FT bluntly: "Some [EU] capitals are opposed to a pure digital tax because they don't want to upset the Americans, and many more are opposed to CORE. The solution is to expand [the tax] to cover pretty much all the big companies."

The design is meant to sweep in European manufacturers, retailers and banks alongside Silicon Valley. That would blunt Washington's main complaint, which is that digital levies single out American firms.

A Commission spokesperson did not address the reported changes directly. The spokesperson told Reuters the Commission "remains ready to support the Council and European Parliament in reaching an agreement on the new own resources package," which the spokesperson called "essential to ensure the adequate financing of our joint priorities over the next decade."

Apple, Google, Meta and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which represents several US tech companies, did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Why Brussels is going around the front door

The EU has tried to tax Big Tech before and backed off. Finance ministers dropped an EU-wide digital tax in March 2019. Leaked drafts showed the Commission dropped a digital levy from its budget plans in July 2025, again under US trade pressure, according to the think tank ECIPE. France, Italy, Spain and Austria went ahead with national digital taxes anyway.

Washington has not been shy about retaliation. In 2019, the US Trade Representative concluded France's digital services tax singled out Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, and prepared duties of up to 100% on $2.4 billion of French goods.

President Donald Trump raised the stakes this June. He threatened a 100% tariff on "any and all Goods" from any country that imposes a digital services tax on US firms, and said it would override existing trade deals. That warning came shortly before a July 4 deadline tied to a framework agreed in May that caps most tariffs on EU exports at 15%.

The USTR has long argued such levies discriminate against American companies, which dominate the sector globally. Separately, Washington has criticized the Commission's €890 million Digital Markets Act fine against Google: €460 million for search self-preferencing and €430 million for Google Play anti-steering practices. Google is appealing EU orders to share search data and open Android to rivals.

The unanimity wall

Any new EU "own resource" needs unanimous approval from all 27 member states under Article 311 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, followed by ratification under each country's constitutional rules. One government can sink the package.

That is the problem the FT's source described: some capitals fear US retaliation, and more oppose CORE outright.

Who is calling this a money grab

Critics of the EU's fiscal direction see the levy as part of a bigger appetite for revenue. Writing for ZeroHedge, commentator Thomas Kolbe argued that Brussels is under growing pressure to finance itself. He pointed to the refinancing of the €800 billion NextGenerationEU borrowing, which comes due from 2028, and to von der Leyen's push for a two-trillion-euro budget. In his words, "Every new source of tax revenue therefore comes in handy." Kolbe is an opinion writer, not a Commission source, and the Commission has not tied CORE to that debt in the statements cited here.

On the legal question, Newsquawk's market analysis noted that a levy whose burden still falls overwhelmingly on US-headquartered firms could draw the same retaliation regardless of its formal breadth. Whether a broad levy passes the discrimination test in practice is untested.

What comes next

Newsquawk identified the formal proposal text and the response from Washington as the follow-ons to watch, along with any parallel movement in the OECD pillar negotiations. The harder test sits with the member-state governments that must approve it. Capitals already opposed to CORE in its mild form would have to accept a version that costs their own large companies more.