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Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies

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Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies

#61
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not an analysis, it's a rant, sure. BUT as an Italian, I've seen this over and over and it sickens me. Italy is one of those very few countries where for years you couldn't legally run an open wifi spot - you had to file ID cards of each and every user, and send them to the police on request. Where the early cypherpunk scene was criminalised and associated with terrorism - the police would just sequester entire…

Thanks for detailing this, and I agree

But in Germany, open wifi spots are also a pain. A huge pain

Most places won't bother. However, the problem is not opening it, it's what's done with it and who's responsible if anything is done with it (read, copyright infringement).

Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies

#62
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are doing that in most EU countries, not only Italy or the PIGS. I would say the PIGS have a lot of reasons besides maybe this why they are going badly; simple things like being anti-client-friendly as much as possible and finding that normal.

I have a little experience in several EU countries, and if there's any correlation, it's generally in the other direction, with the higher-tax ones generally being better places to do business (I doubt this is a causal relationship, though). The issue with southern Europe is that the government is corrupt, slow, and non-transparent, and regulations are unpredictable and inconsistently enforced. For example, Denmark's…

Well that last example shows some of the PIGS problems which actually do make it bad business places; the 'mañana‎' thing is deeply ingrained because (I think and hope), before, they didn't really have to care. Although it's been 40-60 years since that was true, it's very much real in all of them. Portugal is moving away from that faster than the others in my experience.

Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies

#63
post #49
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> 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). Is every CDN's depended on privileged position inside ISP's? DNS by design is on the edge of the network, and works perfectly fine regardless of who ask the server for a lookup. If the DNS server want to do geo-depended service, they only have to use geo-ip to figure out where a…

You have no clue how Akamai/GoogleGlobalCache work eh? :)

Re: Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies

#64
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would this help Italian government? All income would flow up to the US and get eventually taxed there.

As is the case with other products and services from other countries. Tax the local businesses that are benefitting from the ads and services.

Umm..this is too stupid to argue with, sorry.
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