251–260 of 501 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sogeti is also very large, founded in 2002.
Looks like they were acquired by Capgemini
Sogeti merged very soon after it was formed. It's never really been known as its own company.
Good. Next step, have EU countries come up with an estimation of the value of their citizens' private data that FB and Google gobbles up and tax them on that too. Edit: companies -> countries
Regulators are not quick, give them a year or two to deliver the fines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All money made on the white market in any country is facilitated by that government, and taxes are paid on all profits to pay for the services which allowed the profit to be made. So any taxation is justified? > It's not arbitrary to expect businesses to pay for services they benefit from. Any digital company with revenue of more than €750m ($850m; £670m) - of which at least €25m is generated in France - would be s…
> So any taxation is justified? A corp will raise prices to whatever level the market will bear. Why shouldn't a society do the same with taxes?
A corp exists in a competitive market and can rarely raise prices to "whatever level the market will bear". If I don't like their prices, I use their competitor.
What competitor does my mandatory government and it's confiscatory tax agency have? What alternative do I have but to hand over half my work to them to be frittered away on foreign wars and grants for indolence and incompetence?
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Whether you're /s or not, I wholly agree; I both fully support using public policy, tariffs, and other economic mechanisms to support "at home" companies over those abroad, as well as supporting local labor over that outside the country. If internet companies are the future of the economy (see: Stripe's opinion), why wouldn't you do everything you could as a country to support your own companies?
Because protectionism isn’t only economically bad but also immoral. You can’t force everybody else to pay higher prices. Supporting your own companies at the expense of the rest of the society isn’t good. You’ll be forcing consumers to pay higher prices for a completely nationalist reason. No reasonable economist would favor protectionism.
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I suppose it's just like how the tax law changes in the US were not designed to hurt high-tax liberal states more than low-tax conservative states, but that the high-tax liberal states were just taking advantage of the standard deduction. Unfortunately in these cases, perception is just as important as the nominal reason.
How can you tell that they weren't? There are always pretexts and blindly trusting face value explanations for a policy is dangerously naive.
What happened to a company who has no physical presence in France refuse to pay the tax on the ground that France has no jurisdiction upon them? Ordering French ISPs to block the web service of that company thereby breaking the fundamental human right of freedom of speech and no censorship.
Taxing digital companies based on digital presence certainly makes sense to me, as a layperson. A company that's selling ads to a French company that wants to show those ads to French users is doing business in France, end of story. Taxing only very large corporations - that's a little more questionable, but plenty of countries (including the US) treat small businesses preferentially, so it's not like it's unpreceden…
Taxation/regulations can place an undue burden on smaller companies. So I think it's perfectly acceptable to use size as a component of taxation. It's like progressive taxation applied to business.
The US administration is presenting the new tax as if it was specifically targeted to US companies because of their origin. Like a tariff. It is not the case at all. Yes the biggest tech giants that do not pay enough tax are mostly from the US (also other companies from other countries are affected too) But it is not because they are from the US that this new tax is created. It is simply because they don't pay enough…
An easy rebuff to the US is simple: if they are American companies, why aren't they paying American taxes on their European business activities?
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I really wish US companies would take a more forceful approach with these rogue governments. “You get off our back or we pull out of your countries”
I would be happy if those spy organisations like Google and Facebook would leave my country.
Facebook, on the other hand, isn't something that anyone really needs. What value does Facebook actually provide anyway, besides giving people a forum to post boring family photos for grandma to look at? I guess Facebook Marketplace can be sorta useful for selling your old junk, but that's the only thing that comes to mind.
Remember also that there's only two players in the smartphone market: Apple and Google (which makes the software and app store behind Android). If you loose Google and Android, that means everyone's going to be sorta forced into buying an iPhone unless they want to go back to flip-phones. Do you really want an Apple monopoly in your country?
I never understood the logic behind taxing large internet businesses. The idea behind taxes is that you use some public resource and you pay for that service. You own a home in a neighborhood, you pay property tax that funds the schools. You drive a car, you pay gasoline tax that funds the streets. You hire workers locally, you pay the tax to pay back all the contributions public institutions made to adding the skill…