BERLIN — Germany’s culture ministry is drafting a bill that would introduce a levy of 10 percent on big digital platforms that use media content.

“The major American digital platforms such as Alphabet/Google, Meta and Co. are on my agenda,” Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer told Stern magazine in an interview. “We consider a tax rate of 10 percent to be moderate and legitimate.”

Digital levies would disproportionately target U.S. tech giants such as Apple and Google. That could set Germany on a collision course with the U.S. if it is viewed as a retaliatory move against the Trump administration’s global tariff onslaught, which hits Germany’s export-driven and struggling economy particularly hard.

“First of all, I have invited the Google management and important industry representatives to the chancellery for talks in order to examine the alternatives such as voluntary commitments,” said Weimer, who is a member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right party. “At the same time, we are preparing a draft law.”

The bill would be drafted along the lines of a similar levy already in place in Austria, Weimer said. Earlier this month, the Commission floated a similar proposal to raise the funds needed to repay its €350 billion post-Covid debt, which Germany had opposed back then.

The shift appears to have been closely coordinated with the chancellery.

“We are very easy on American tech companies in terms of taxes. It doesn’t have to stay that way,” Merz said in an interview broadcast earlier this week, but added: “I don’t want to escalate this conflict. I want us to resolve it together.”