Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech Giants Set to Face 3% Tax on Revenue Under New EU Plan

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 314 posts

Re: Tech Giants Set to Face 3% Tax on Revenue Under New EU Plan

#171

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

Mononokay wrote: post #129
oliwarner wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free trade [.. is] just better for everyone involved How are zero-rate imports better for everyone? The consumer saves money. The government loses sales tax revenue, loses income tax revenue from the people that could have made it locally, has lower employment rates. Buying locally doesn't always make sense, but often you can make an economic argument that paying slightly more for something made and sold locally is…

> Buying locally doesn't always make sense, but often you can make an economic argument that paying slightly more for something made and sold locally is better for the consumer too. 9/10 times this isn't correct. If you live in an urban capital, sure. If you live in somewhere more rural, oftentimes the only local makers in the area will be rather terrible, and a large company will have a better warranty almost all of…

The impact of globalization against rural communities is one of the biggest reasons why there is the anti-globalization push. Sure, local makers may not be as nice as a large company, but when items are shipped from overseas instead, jobs and manufacturing are no longer pushed to rural areas anymore, leading to big cities being the only areas to grow.

Re: Tech Giants Set to Face 3% Tax on Revenue Under New EU Plan

#172

Post by adventured »

gaius wrote: post #158

Google et al: (smugly) we comply strictly with the letter of the law, if you want us to pay more change the law Government: hold my beer Google: it’s not fair!!! (fx: bitter tears) Let’s charge them the back taxes for all their evading years too

Avoidance is not evasion, so your back tax / theft premise will fall apart there. It would never survive a legal challenge.

This EU fake tax is actually a new tariff.

The EU has a $100 billion net trade surplus with the US. Germany - by far the largest economy in the EU - in particular has an extreme trade imbalance with the US in relation to the size of the trade between the two countries.

The German trade deficit is so extreme, it's larger than the total sum of all exports from the US to Germany in fact.

The US is the least trade dependent developed nation on earth:

https://i.imgur.com/q7TrEZF.jpg

Every nation that has a large surplus with the US, that decides to pick a trade fight, will be guaranteed to lose a lot more than the US does accordingly.

The US for example imports three times from China, what China does from the US. A trade war with China is ideal for the same reason it's going to be ideal with Germany and the EU broadly. In a perfect world, the US will import dramatically fewer consumer goods from China, Germany and overall in general. Instead the US should consume less from abroad and shift those resources to domestic capital formation and investment toward greater US production. That's further ideal at a time when automation gains will make it easier to reshore ever greater manufacturing. The vast US capabilities around manufacturing and energy, make the US uniquely positioned among major economies to not need very many outside nations.

Re: Tech Giants Set to Face 3% Tax on Revenue Under New EU Plan

#174

Post by tonfa »

Buge wrote: post #124

Let's say a company has their headquarters in country A. A user from country B uploads a video filmed in country C. Someone from country D buys an ad to be placed on that video, and the purchase is processed in country E, while the sales agent is based in country F. A different user in country G watches the video and clicks on the ad. The video was served from a server in country H, and the ad from a server in countr…

Assuming you are talking about corporate taxes (not sales tax / VAT).

If those were all different companies (one company doing the sales, one company hosting the infrastructure, one company developing the system, etc.) doing arm's length transaction it would be much simpler, each company would pay local tax in its own profit.

Re: Tech Giants Set to Face 3% Tax on Revenue Under New EU Plan

#175

Post by tonfa »

pimmen wrote: post #128
Buge wrote: post #124

Let's say a company has their headquarters in country A. A user from country B uploads a video filmed in country C. Someone from country D buys an ad to be placed on that video, and the purchase is processed in country E, while the sales agent is based in country F. A different user in country G watches the video and clicks on the ad. The video was served from a server in country H, and the ad from a server in countr…

Country D, I think. That's where the sale was made.

Are you talking about sales tax, or corporate taxes?

Out of curiosity, what makes you think it should be D, assuming you were talking about corporate tax?

With a much simpler example, if a merchant in e.g. France sells a product to a consumer in e.g. USA, the VAT/import/sales tax should go to the US but the corporate tax on profit for the merchant is taxed in France.

Re: Tech Giants Set to Face 3% Tax on Revenue Under New EU Plan

#176

Post by wallace_f »

lovich wrote: post #121
lovich wrote: post #101

Why are a large amount of people treaing access to other nations markets as a human right? I can see the argument behind saying you should have access to your local market be realtively free, you have to live somewhere, and you and your local societies interests are relatively aligned. However,when it comes to foreign markets many people here seems to want the best of both worlds. It's a paraphrase but it seems like…

As a response to several people stating that free trade is better for everyone. I've taken economics courses, I understand how free trade is better overall. However, those calculations only work when both sides follow the same rules. Once you have different groups of people with different values, whether it's the EU valuing privacy, China valuing domestic production, or the US valuing intellectual property, absloute…

Also an education in econ.

Unfortunately with econ, our tools are maths, stats, logic and reasoning. We can almost never do actual experiments, which is fundamentally necessary for science. In my opinion, an unpopular but correct description of the state of economics is that the best economists are the ones who are able to make the arguments which others value the most.

Re: Tech Giants Set to Face 3% Tax on Revenue Under New EU Plan

#177

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #56
Jyaif wrote: post #36

Out of curiosity, is there any European tech company that has 750m in taxable annual revenues?

Spotify? Booking?

I think Booking are safe, as they actually sell access to a physical product. Spotify definitely though (and given that the records labels will take any extra profit they make, this might actually be OK for them).

It's not going to pass though, these things never do, as unanimity is required.

Re: Tech Giants Set to Face 3% Tax on Revenue Under New EU Plan

#178

Post by nl »

cromwellian wrote: post #37
mtgx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is really changing in terms of taxation. Technically, the difference is relatively small - being taxed a small percentage of revenue instead of a larger percentage of profit (yes I know it's debatable which would be ideal). The really big difference is they can actually enforce revenue-based taxation, because revenue in a country is directly tied to the number of users/customers in that country. Meanwhile, pr…

People are up in arms about China as well, and IMHO, the US and EU should take them to the WTO over unfair trade practices. But stop focusing on Google for a moment, and consider poor Twitter. Can they really afford this tax? If you're already losing money, or breaking even, why should you have to pay taxes on $$$/user earned in the US or Japan?

I’d feel a lot more sympathy for Twitter if they had a functioning sales organisation which would take money. Also an advertising product which worked even a bit. At the moment it is cheaper and gets better results to create bots on their platform than to pay to advertise.

I’m not sure that their incompetence should protect them from taxation.

Think about consumption taxes. They work in a somewhat similar way.

Re: Tech Giants Set to Face 3% Tax on Revenue Under New EU Plan

#179

Post by nl »

Mononokay wrote: post #131
cryptoz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> consider poor Twitter. Can they really afford this tax? If they can't afford a simple tax on their business in a region then they shouldn't be doing business there or at all. What do you mean, "poor Twitter"? It's not a person. It doesn't have emotions or feelings. We don't need to treat it like a poor little snowflake and make sure it never melts. If Twitter can't handle being taxed then Twitter should die. That's…

It can be argued that Twitter is less a for-profit corporation and more a public-benefit corporation at this point. Considering most EU officials communicate with denizens on it, and that it arguably costs them a far greater amount than what they'll be taxed for, it's hard to argue that they aren't already really paying tax in a roundabout way, donating computational resources to the EU to maintain stability of the U…

Having public officials on their platform is a benefit to them (network effects), and the marginal cost is as close to zero as to immeasurably different.
Post reply on HN