Trying to trace more detail on this: https://www.taxwatchuk.org/seven-large-tech-groups-estimated...
replyThat mentions the digital services tax; I remember some of HN being quite angry that "Europe" was trying to get a share of the immense wealth extracted from it by American multinationals.
Wealth extracted from a company sounds like taxes.
replyHow did we go from "wealth extracted from [Europeans and Europe]" to "wealth extracted from a company"?
reply"Wealth extracted from it" seems like a disingenuous framing of "voluntary market exchange of money for services." It's not like Europe is a colony. Tech companies only make money by providing goods and services people choose to pay for.
replyGiven all then dumping, bundling, vendor lock-in and shady background deals I am not sure how voluntary this often is in practice.
replyAlso, almost any web product could have the core functionality reproduced by 3 guys in a couple of weeks.
replyThe actual value is in the brand, siloed data, lockin, network effect, etc.
China solved that by banning most western services and building their own, and many of the results are better than the west, yet the same network effects stop those services expanding.
These are all fairly strong arguments for regulator's to step in because the market clearly is no longer working to direct the profit towards the best products.
The have to share their wealth because they are allowed to operate within a stable legal framework that everybody else is paying for except them. It seems like US isn't using their own taxes efficiently enough given that CEOs dont get killed on the street in the EU but they do get killed in the US. And these corporations arent willing to pay for that, well then they should not be allowed to operate here either.
replyWhat you mean is American multinationals were inventing things people wanted to pay for and the existing government rent seeking wasn't working.
replyI see a very funny fight on our hands.
replyAh, the next level in determining Schrodinger's cat's outcome is if the detector measures Zuckerberg's profit taxability instead of radiation decay; the measurement's results depend on who is carrying them out, where they've taken place and, in all instances, the cat kills itself due to our inability to fix the crazy rich-favoring taxation systems.
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