Spain planning on going ahead with ‘Google tax’ despite US tariff threats

Sure, they're taking advantage of tax loopholes I'd bet but in themselves, they're not necessarily against the law.

They're probably paying all the tax in Spain they're currently, legally obliged to pay at the moment.

Just my £0.02

Edit: Just thought of something? Is there a google.es? If this is what they are talking about, would it not be easier for Google just to bin that one and for Spaniards to be automatically redirected to another Spanish-speaking version, like one of the South American ones?

There have been many stupid attempts to target Google in the past from vested interests (snippet tax, link tax) - but this one isn't very objectionable.

The main legitimacy to the complaint is that even though nation neutral it is defacto targetted by industry concentration because of the lack of international Spanish internet companies. A flimsier one but there. The second is the populist rhetoric to sell it caused offense by targetting their companies. Plus countries in international relations are best anthropoisized as a bunch of hypocritical petty bastards.

A flatter 3% corporate tax rate wouldn't have those grounds but would piss off the local corporate interests and possibly ideologe powers abroad still.

The ad sales might make sense, but why not just add a tax on all advertising.

The marketplace tax is confusing because do they tax the value of the transaction? The full customer value that results of the acquisition? Why not just use existing sales tax for retail transaction (which e-commerce is).

The last one is the hardest to understand. Do they mean sale of data from Spanish citizens? Or only people created data while in Spain?

It seems simpler to just create a “data sales tax” that happens specifically for transactions where data is sold to or from Spanish orgs.

I think this will just result in a tarrif on Spanish goods.