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Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

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Re: Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

#111

Post by UnFleshedOne »

manfredo wrote: post #67
UnFleshedOne wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More tourism attracts the ire of residents that now have to deal with out-of-town people walking around their neighborhood, but I have rarely seen someone complain about negative economic impact of tourism let alone make a coherent argument about why it's bad. Tourism is an economic curse similar to the curse of resources. It makes most unrelated economic activity less viable.

> Tourism is an economic curse similar to the curse of resources. It makes most unrelated economic activity less viable. Got any source to back up this claim? Plenty of regions with strong tourism industries have other viable industries. San Francisco, LA, and New York are all heavy tourist destinations but no reasonable person would say that this tourism has made unrelated economic activity less viable. Same with Lo…

This is more pronounced in underdeveloped areas and especially if the whole country is underdeveloped -- people can't exactly move away to an area with a different major economic force, because all other forces are dwarfed. See this article [0] for more elaboration.

[0] http://unevenearth.org/2017/04/is-tourism-a-poverty-trap/

Re: Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

#112

Post by finchisko »

omnimus wrote: post #102
bartimus wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You say that like "tech giants" are a good thing. What you see is that - if the Czech Republic would have their own tech giants - they wouldn't propose such an aggressive taxation towards it. It's why Germany was against such taxes because they fear repercussions towards their own industry. > But a predatory attitude focused only on their own growth and "to hell with everyone else". Such a predatory attitude also g…

It's worth noting that Czechia is small 10mil citizen country. So are many other eu countries. The language/culture/policy difference is a real decentralizing showstoping force. What it means is that many countries have their startups just filling vacuims of small local services (their ubers, airbnbs, craigslists, groupons etc.) companies you've never heard of. At best the countries find "niche" in tech. For example…

and porn hub (not the site) :) And btw ESET is from Slovakia.

Re: Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

#113

Post by finchisko »

3xblah wrote: post #89
bartimus wrote: post #57

We can do this in Europe because we are great at killing innovation through our taxes and regulations. This way we can safely tax innovative tech giants without hurting our own tech giants. Because they don't exist here. We don't like that thing that you do. So we'll just apply taxes and let you continue doing the thing we don't like you to do.

The parent comment suggests European countries are killing "innovation" through taxes and regulation. This sounds like a bad idea, so I had a look at the article to see what "innovation" was being taxed. Innovation is a "new idea, creative thoughts, new imaginations in form of device or method". (source: merriam-webster.com) Plugging in our definition of innovation, the question becomes: What is the new idea, creativ…

Actually I would like to see those questions answered. :) I personally see very little innovation (in terms of greater addition to our society) in sites like facebook, airbnb ... I was kind of fan of Uber in the beginning, but after the scandals it seems they're not different from any other big corp. Just greedy as others.

Re: Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

#114

Post by finchisko »

9HZZRfNlpR wrote: post #95
tmefq wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about the situation in Czechia but in Spain (where I live) I'd say most of it is caused by the fact that jobs have moved to the big cities to the point where there's nothing left to do in small/mid-sized towns. Personally I blame shopping centres (which have destroyed most small stores in every town they've settled in, and don't require as many active people) and cheap production in Eastern Europe and China…

Out of curiosity, what does Eastern Europe produce that Spain needs or buys?

I would like to hear that too. Where do you feel strong competition from eastern eu countries?

Re: Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

#115

Post by ed_balls »

ed_balls wrote: post #18

I have a feeling that this won't work. The only robust way to implement fair tax is to tax corporation 1%, but everyone in EEA has to do it. I know that taxing revenue is not optimal, but how much money corporations spend on gov audits, accounting what is profit and what is cost etc.

I'd appreciate a reason why I was downvoted.

Re: Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

#116

Post by blub »

bartimus wrote: post #109
blub wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be using an unconventional definition of punish and corrective action. Microsoft was steamrolling over the huge community battling it, including Apple, Netscape, Sun and Linux. United States vs. Microsoft Corp forced them to behave, otherwise that huge community would have had to battle them from beyond the grave. Facebook is a very profitable behemoth. Where exactly is the punishment? Oh, they have to impro…

But that's just not how it happened. That settlement was pretty much insignificant. First Amazon launched their online book store. Then Microsoft made a $150 million investment into Apple. Then Google launched its search innovation. Linux and Apache were already hugely successful with dominating the web. Java and PHP were kicking ASP's ass. https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2019/04/22/april-2019-web... Microsoft got…

That settlement tied their hands competitively, made them think thrice before playing dirty and took the wind out of their sails. The settlement is what permitted Apple and Google to exist in the first place, so that they could launch the iPhone and Android.

Amazon was utterly irrelevant back then, they were a book store FFS. The investment into Apple was happening in the middle of the anti-trust fight, for crying out loud. And Google was invented also during that time and would have gone exactly nowhere with an IE monopoly.

MS crushed Linux on the desktop and they use it just like anybody else on the server. They even included it in Windows, Linux for them is not a competitor, it's a tool.

Re: Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

#117

Post by cle »

save_ferris wrote: post #4
cle wrote: post #2

> The potential disparity between the value of personal data and what users receive in return creates space for governments to seek reimbursement on society’s behalf. Is there a way to leverage competition to reduce this disparity instead of taxation? If there were proper competition, would there be a disparity?

The problem here isn't a lack of competition. This happens because tech companies are well-equipped to siphon user data at massive scale and have been given the luxury of embedding these services into our daily lives without sufficiently educating the public around their business models. Ultimately, the public has very little control over what these companies do with this data, so there's a perverse mismatch of incen…

> Ultimately, the public has very little control over what these companies do with this data, so there's a perverse mismatch of incentives here.

That's what I'm getting at.

See for example: https://stratechery.com/2016/antitrust-and-aggregation/

Re: Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

#118

Post by bartimus »

arp242 wrote: post #105
bartimus wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry. I can rant on about this for hours and hours and I feel like I'm already dominating this discussion too much. I don't believe language barriers are such a big problem. Most tech people speak English. What's ironic is that those language barriers are exactly solved thanks to translation innovations coming from the US. I'm now able to communicate much more easily with fellow Europeans. I truly believe we hav…

That okay, we all get carried away sometimes. I think you are underestimating the language and cultural barriers inside Europe. When I still lived in the Netherlands (my native country) we got a British employee at some point. Everyone in the company spoke English reasonably well, but not quite fluently. So what happened was that lunch conversations started out in English but quickly evolved to Dutch. I felt bad abou…

So according to the CPB welfare spending as a percentage of GDP in the Netherlands increased significantly from ~20% (1930) to ~40% (1970) up to ~60% (1980).

https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/publicaties/download/...

As welfare spending increased we started losing our ability to innovate. We lost DAF cars (1972), Fokker (1996) and Philips has become a shadow of what it used to be.

So take a company like Philips. Before they brought technical innovations like color television, the VCR and Compact Disc. I believe product development has since shifted from hardcore engineering design (technical) towards industrial design (art). Philips now believes it's all about "consumer lifestyle" as opposed to developing the next technological breakthroughs. Since then the consumer divisions pretty much died and all that remains are the consumer-less engineering divisions (ASML and Philips healthcare).

How did this happen? I believe the welfare attitude plays a big role. People have gotten too comfortable. The education system is part to blame as well. Colleges and universities trying to lure students with sexy programs and the promises of sexy careers (that no company needs). Engineering usually isn't on that list of sexy jobs.

In the US people seem to better understand you need to work hard to move forward. A job is more about the value you can provide as opposed to the value you receive. It seems we understood that better in Europe a couple of decades ago.

Re: Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

#119

Post by bartimus »

blub wrote: post #116
bartimus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's just not how it happened. That settlement was pretty much insignificant. First Amazon launched their online book store. Then Microsoft made a $150 million investment into Apple. Then Google launched its search innovation. Linux and Apache were already hugely successful with dominating the web. Java and PHP were kicking ASP's ass. https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2019/04/22/april-2019-web... Microsoft got…

That settlement tied their hands competitively, made them think thrice before playing dirty and took the wind out of their sails. The settlement is what permitted Apple and Google to exist in the first place, so that they could launch the iPhone and Android. Amazon was utterly irrelevant back then, they were a book store FFS. The investment into Apple was happening in the middle of the anti-trust fight, for crying ou…

> The settlement is what permitted Apple and Google to exist in the first place.

How did it permit Google to exist? Google was running fine on IE.

> Amazon was utterly irrelevant back then

It was busy growing into the giant it is today. Nobody saw that coming back then.

> And Google was invented also during that time and would have gone exactly nowhere with an IE monopoly.

Why would an IE monopoly have prevented Google? Google came into existence exactly when Microsoft was dominating the browser market. Microsoft wasn't set out to dominate the web. They were pretty much embracing the dotcom boom (which included Google). They just wanted to make sure you would be browsing the web using their OS.

> Linux for them is not a competitor, it's a tool.

How is being a tool not a measure of success? We all use Windows as our tool. Linux was simply dominating its market.

You paint a grim picture of a predatory company trying to dominate the world. Meanwhile Microsoft was exactly so successful because - on the one hand - they allowed other vendors to create hardware for their OS and - on the other hand - Windows was very much geared towards other companies building software on top of Windows. Sure, Microsoft was taking some protective measures to solidify their business. But what you're implying is that - without the antitrust case - they would've gone straight against their own business model that made them so successful.

I will grant you the 150 million investment into Apple. That would perhaps not have happened without the antitrust case. Perhaps there wouldn't have been an iPhone. But what's often overlooked is how Steam was actually the first app store with auto-update features. Apple wasn't the only player in the mobile market. Android was already under development 4 years before the first iPhone came out. Google had already acquired Android 2 years before the first iPhone came out.

It's all pure speculation. But the fact is there were plenty of corrective/competitive forces. Who knows what would've happened without the antitrust case. I'm not convinced it would have resulted in Microsoft being able to maintain its dominance.

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