I'm Italian. Here tax burden for artisans, small business, big companies is over 50%. What if we could shift part of the taxation from artisans to big multinationals? What's wrong with this idea?
Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
#12Google, Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) and Amazon.com Inc. have been criticized for strategies that shift billions of dollars of profits offshore.[...] Google last year moved nearly $12 billion to the Bermuda unit, the majority of its worldwide income, cutting more than $2 billion off its global income tax bill. Google’s Italian unit last year reported total income taxes of just 1.8 million euros, corporate filings show. Goo…
[deleted]
Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
#13I'm Italian. Here tax burden for artisans, small business, big companies is over 50%. What if we could shift part of the taxation from artisans to big multinationals? What's wrong with this idea?
That it does not lower at all taxes on common people and normal jobs. Large corporations who have interests (and money to enforce it) will always find a way (at least political).
This is the usual attempt from our politicians, who have no idea how a computer is turned on (no wait.. they play poker on their ipad while discussing laws), to regulat something they do not understand.
Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
#14Italy: always at the forefront of legislative innovation to kill the internet. Piratebay blocks? Check. Fighting encryption and anonimity? Check. Taxing the crap out of anything that moves? Check. Cutting investments in r&d and universities across thr board? Check. And then they wonder why their economy sucks.
Regarding "piratebay blocks" and, more generically, DNS censorship: recently, RIPE published [1] usage estimations of 8.8.8.8 by country. It is estimated that 12% of Italian internet users has configured 8.8.8.8 on their machine, which I believe is an astonishing high number!
I work at an Italian ISP and we ran some statistics ourselves and found that percentage to be around 5%, which is lower but still massive. If you consider that the average Internet user doesn't even know what "DNS" is... that means a considerable part of tech-savy users are not using their ISP's DNS (which breaks down many kind of things, among which CDNs).
That's a direct consequence of Government-issued DNS censorship, which all Italian ISP need to obey.
[1] https://labs.ripe.net/Members/gih/measuring-googles-public-d...
Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
#15Google, Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) and Amazon.com Inc. have been criticized for strategies that shift billions of dollars of profits offshore.[...] Google last year moved nearly $12 billion to the Bermuda unit, the majority of its worldwide income, cutting more than $2 billion off its global income tax bill. Google’s Italian unit last year reported total income taxes of just 1.8 million euros, corporate filings show. Goo…
[deleted]
Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
#16Italy: always at the forefront of legislative innovation to kill the internet. Piratebay blocks? Check. Fighting encryption and anonimity? Check. Taxing the crap out of anything that moves? Check. Cutting investments in r&d and universities across thr board? Check. And then they wonder why their economy sucks.
This is a far too simplistic analysis of a multifaceted issue with no single answer. It's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear on Fox.
Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
#17The biggest problem with this law is not its effect on google: the way it's written now forbids any Italian internet user from visualizing ads that were not purchased from an Italian company, and this applies to all websites. So while Google might be forced to comply, most international websites won't, rendering them automatically illegal in Italy, which is probably unenforceable. While I agree with the spirit of mak…
Have you read the law? Do it.
Rendering is not illegal, but if you're an Italian company you can buy online ads only from another Italian company.
Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
#18How about making the country a better place to start a company instead? You know, so you can attract foreign capital and entrepreneurs, and also reduce the local brain drain.
No wonder Italians run to Germany, UK and Ireland to start their companies.
Also, good luck enforcing that law.
Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
#19Google, Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) and Amazon.com Inc. have been criticized for strategies that shift billions of dollars of profits offshore.[...] Google last year moved nearly $12 billion to the Bermuda unit, the majority of its worldwide income, cutting more than $2 billion off its global income tax bill. Google’s Italian unit last year reported total income taxes of just 1.8 million euros, corporate filings show. Goo…
I think you're misunderstanding what's going on.
Google employs lots of local people in many different countries to sell ads, etc.
In order to do so it has national companies that are owned by Google US, but are separate legal entities.
But what's happening is the national sales people are closing deals but then book those ads through a different legal entity in Ireland, even though the sale happened with a local sales person, in a local company. This is with the express purpose of avoiding tax and claiming it was 'only following the law', when it is clearly deliberately avoiding tax.
That is why it started getting into serious trouble in the UK when it became clear that it was the Google UK sales people who were closing the deals but then the deals would magically appear on Google Ireland's books.
As far as I understand it, it then uses the double dutch loophole to avoid paying even Ireland's corporation tax.
Google US does not employ the Italian or the French or the UK sales people.
So what you said, as far as I understand it, makes no sense. Google are based in Italy.
http://www.google.co.uk/about/company/facts/locations/
Notice how a lot of the locations have localised version of the US's 'Inc' like 'Ltd', 'GmbH', 'n.v.'. They're all owned by Google Plc (US).
Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
#20How about making the country a better place to start a company instead? You know, so you can attract foreign capital and entrepreneurs, and also reduce the local brain drain. No wonder Italians run to Germany, UK and Ireland to start their companies. Also, good luck enforcing that law.
Because that takes too much strategic thinking for these spastic, greedy bureaucrats.