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G20 agrees to push ahead with digital tax

reuters.com

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Re: G20 agrees to push ahead with digital tax

#81

Post by norswap »

malvosenior wrote: post #72
norswap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course that is the only criteria at play. This tweet is entirely correct. There is absoluuuutely no way there are other issues to be considered. Nope!

Of course there are multiple issues at play, this is one of them. Are you proposing that the extra layers of legislation around technology companies don't hamper innovation?

(1) The parent definitely implies that this is the main differentiator between US and EU.

(2) I don't think (meaning, I haven't heard except in the vaguest of terms) that there is that much "extra layers of legislation around tech". GDPR comes to mind — and honestly it's not that much of a bother, it just mandates things that companies should already be doing.

Re: G20 agrees to push ahead with digital tax

#82

Post by arcbyte »

dang wrote: post #80
arcbyte wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they pay taxes simply because they have resources that society needs That is called theft, is not a view of any kind, and the prevention of which is literally the reason "society" was formed in the first place

Please don't post generic ideological comments to HN. Such discussions are all the same, therefore boring, therefore off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why are you posting this under my comment and not the more inane comment I responded to?

Re: G20 agrees to push ahead with digital tax

#83

Post by FDSGSG »

ionised wrote: post #45
FDSGSG wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that sounds like the exact opposite of winner-takes-it-all.

Thankfully, the EU disagrees with you as do a growing number of people around the world.

> Thankfully, the EU disagrees with you

The EU doesn't disagree with me. Some people involved may be asking questions, but that doesn't mean that the EU disagrees with me.

If the EU disagreed with me we'd know, as they'd be taking action against these companies.

Re: G20 agrees to push ahead with digital tax

#84

Post by AlchemistCamp »

pennaMan wrote: post #10
mfatica wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide some examples there support this claim of a "winner-takes-it-all economy"?

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google should suffice.

Netflix? Its entire business is basically the equivalent of one of Amazon's side experiments!

Re: G20 agrees to push ahead with digital tax

#85

Post by austhrow743 »

cameronbrown wrote: post #75
kingnothing wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook controls 70% of social media Amazon has 50% of all e-commerce spend in the US. Netflix put Blockbuster and every other movie rental store out of business. It currently has 50% of all video streaming traffic in the US. Google has 80% of the search market. I'm not so sure about what Apple monopolizes, but they do have a duopoly in the app store space with Google.

> Google has 80% of the search market. Facebook controls 70% of social media. Wrong way to think about this. If you talk about advertising monopoly, sure. But you'd be hard-pressed to make an argument on a monopoly of free products. > Netflix put Blockbuster and every other movie rental store out of business. That's because Blockbuster was, quite frankly, shit. They failed to adapt to the internet. So what? Times mov…

>Something isn't a monopoly just because it's popular.

If you're a state missing out on tax because the options that provide it to you are unpopular it sure is.

This isn't a discussion about consumers.

Re: G20 agrees to push ahead with digital tax

#86

Post by dang »

arcbyte wrote: post #82
dang wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post generic ideological comments to HN. Such discussions are all the same, therefore boring, therefore off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why are you posting this under my comment and not the more inane comment I responded to?

It was with your comment that the thread became unmoored from the topic and went to Genericland. Such threads are lower in quality, so we moderate them more. See https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for plenty of posts about this over the years.

Re: G20 agrees to push ahead with digital tax

#87

Post by evgen »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #73
nolok wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Except you then realize that in Google and Facebook's case the end user you think of is not the customer/consumer those costs will be passed on. EDIT: downvoting me doesn't change the fact that those 2 don't make their money by charging you and me their users, they charge advertisers who want to show us ads and get our data. If a cost needs to be passed on, it will be passed on them.

Those advertisers will pass the cost onto their customers. This is consumer facing advertising we're talking about. The people the advertisers pass their cost on to are the consumers, the people buying their products and services.

Sorry, but reality does not work that way. The economy is not really some collection of autonomous agents trading spherical cows like macro-economists would like you to think. When you get two or three layers removed from a cost/benefit at this scale it has been reduced to noise. What will happen is that the ad vendors (Google, FB, etc) will pass some of the cost on to ad buyers but not all and the tech titan stockholders will take a small hit. The ad buyers will integrate the new costs into their ad models and so they will view it as a cost of advertising and pay it (small profit hit) or will consider alternative advertising options if the cost impacts advertising ROI. What will the consumers pay? Nothing.

Re: G20 agrees to push ahead with digital tax

#88

Post by afjl »

evgen wrote: post #87
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those advertisers will pass the cost onto their customers. This is consumer facing advertising we're talking about. The people the advertisers pass their cost on to are the consumers, the people buying their products and services.

Sorry, but reality does not work that way. The economy is not really some collection of autonomous agents trading spherical cows like macro-economists would like you to think. When you get two or three layers removed from a cost/benefit at this scale it has been reduced to noise. What will happen is that the ad vendors (Google, FB, etc) will pass some of the cost on to ad buyers but not all and the tech titan stockho…

This comment seems a bit speculative, do you have or is there information out there that supports this?

This is more anecdotal, but my time at a logistics company has shown the opposite to be true. Every cost increase, whether it was a tariff or increased fuel surcharge, was passed on to the next company, and to the next, down to the end consumer themselves. Every increase in vendor/supplier price was reflected almost immediately in the next invoice as our CFO instructed us to maintain our profit margins. There was even a multiplicative effect as each company applied their margins onto each price increase, such that a $100 increase in fuel costs could be double or triple that by the end.

It is possible that companies with massive margins might be willing to bite the bullet, but I doubt the advertising industry is full of companies with big margins. Perhaps the tech companies at the top, but definitely not the more numerous and smaller companies. For this reason, I find it extremely unlikely that "the end user will pay nothing". The end user will pay something, but the size of that "something" is certainly debatable.

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