On July 11, the French Senate passed a digital services tax, which would impose an entirely new tax on large multinationals that provide digital services to consumers or users in France. Digital services include everything from providing a platform for selling goods and services online to targeting advertising based on user data, and the tax applies to gross revenue from such services.

Many French politicians and media outlets have referred to this as a "Gafa tax", meaning that it is designed to apply primarily to companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.com - in other words, multinational tech companies based in the United States.