As a french, seing french government officials trying to impose their knee-jerk « let’s tax it » reaction to any kind of problem makes me absolutely sick. They’re just a bunch of jealous incompetent insufferable pompous politicians than don’t understand a thing about the private sector and so instead of trying to fix the numerous reason why we don’t have any competitor to google / facebook etc ( such as our best engineers fleeing to silicon for the last 30 years) , and how come all those companies HQ in europe are in ireland, prefer to add tax.
That will solve absolutely NOT A SINGLE ISSUE , but it’s just another income to feed the bureaucracy.
Thanks to the three countries that stopped this madness.
PS : i also find it outrageous that gafa don’t pay taxes, but let’s fix the tax heavens in Europe then. Don’t start making special taxes on revenue ffs.
I mean this is a tax problem first and foremost isn't it? The problem being that it's hard for countries to enforce regulations in a virtualized, globalized economy. It's true that it's not just about tax, you also have issues regarding what is and isn't legal in a given country (nazi apology is illegal in France for instance, but good luck enforcing that on the web. Similarly the super harsh "no nudity" rule on american websites is often seen as abusive over here for instance). I mean you seem to agree on that point yourself so it seems that they're not completely wrong to try and fix that.
>They’re just a bunch of jealous incompetent insufferable pompous politicians than don’t understand a thing about the private sector
Talking about knee-jerk reactions.
I strongly dislike this type of empty populist diatribe, that's how we give up on democracy and end up with incompetent fools at the government, just out of spite. Screaming "tous pourris" is not improving anything and is frankly insulting for the many elected officials who are genuinely trying to improve things. Regardless of what they did or didn't do there would be people like you who scream bloody outrage because they're obviously stupid people who understand nothing about nothing. Meanwhile you're not the one trying to balance the budget of a country within the EU.
>let’s fix the tax heavens in Europe then
And how do you propose we do that? Have Le Maire go to the various tax heavens (which in this particular instance would have to include Ireland) and tell them to tax more? How many bottles of Bordeaux would he have to bring to seal the deal?
Having a uniform tax code across the EU would be awesome but it's not like we're anywhere close to something like that.
I’m pro europe, but let’s face it, if we can’t get any kind of cooperation between state members regarding taxes, then maybe it’s time to rethink the inside mechanicsm of the union ( which may include restart from scratch with fewer countries).
This revenue tax won’t change anything. It’s just ransom, and i hate feeling like my representatives make me look like a lazy thief.
I’d even prefer something like what china is doing : since google is a monopoly in europe, which makes it impossible for competitor to compete, let’s impose tarifs or prevent them from doing business in europe as long as they haven’t split, or a true local competitor has emerged. At least this would be very specific to one very particular case. Not the kind of gigantic tax on a whole economy.
having a uniform tax code would pretty much doom the small economies to not having opportunity to grown unless it was "granted to them" as a favor by the same union government.
the ability of member states to set their own taxes is about the only protection they have handling down turns and getting new industry. their currency was given up and without the ability to print money they need other means to mitigate adverse changes to their economies. it is one reason Greece was trapped so long in their misery, bound up by EU laws and stuck with a currency they had no control over.
In the US it works by forcing states to compete on regulation and taxes which benefits everyone. because onerous taxation on one group will certainly follow with others because once that line is crossed it becomes to easy to keep doing so. Indirect taxes are a politicians best friend because you have ready bogeymen and no apparent affect on the public though in reality they are paying the end result
As a French, I totally support this tax. It's easier and more expedient to do it this way than to reform the taxation policies of every European countries.
Also, why is it wrong to tax the income of corporations?
I support it too. Big corporations pay almost no taxes in our country; instead it is individual and small and medium entreprises that are heavily taxed. This makes it very hard to start and run a business in the long term.
As a fellow french having lots of tax lawyer friends, let me just say that you are naive.
Google & al earn money in France, they should pay taxes.
Simple.
Right now those tech giants are using dubious tactics to avoid paying their fair share.
What is needed is simply justice and fairness.
Sorry, the project is actually about taxing "revenue", i fixed it, thanks.
Taxing on revenue means a corporation that actually loose money because its expenses (salaries, investmenst, etc) are larger than its sales would still have to pay taxes, making it loose even more money. It doesn't make any kind of sense unless you're targeting a very particular set of companies that you know are making money. In which case you're taxing those companies, but you're also creating a law that makes it almost impossible for new companies to start competing.
Corporations aren't consumers, so corporation tax is passed on: to customers, employees, or shareholders. Levying taxes via corporations disguises the true level of taxation.
Sales tax and income tax covers everything more efficiently in the right location. Sales tax takes place in the country where the products are sold, then that income to the company is distributed between staff and shareholders who pay income tax where they live and work. Corporation tax is some kind of tax on efficiency and usually in not in an optimal location for the benefit of society, either by accident or on purpose.
I agree with OP. I am French as well. I can confirm that for a French politician, any issue can be solved by adding a new tax. Tax for this, tax for that and whatever else.
They just have no clue about what to do so they try to tax it.
Well, guess what, people who actually want to achieve something productive, who want to make a good living, who want to start a company and not see our profits taxed again and again to feed a bunch of bureaucrats who have never even run a business before, those people they have already left and they are not coming back.
> how come all those companies HQ in europe are in ireland
Ireland has been busted (among others) for secretly passing sweet taxation deals with Google, Facebook, Amazon & co. According to you, that's the way to do it, right ? Tax race to the bottom, give deals to big player that no small company has hope to ever negociate, that's sure to bolster competitors. Any kind of attemp to level the playing field by applying tax uniformly on the European level is "sick".
Nothing to do with a country offering a multinational a deal which results in a lower effective tax rate, and is something _EVERY_ country in Europe offers.
Why should Ireland be able to determine the taxation policies of Ireland? The EU doesn’t set immigration law for Ireland does it? Why should it be allowed to dictate tax law? Low taxes can be a competitive advantage to fiscally responsible countries, why must the EU try to “fix” that?
I'm from the US. You could just replace France with the name of my state in your comment and it would hold. We don't even have scooters yet and they're talking about passing regulation in case it becomes a thing. Some places are really used to using regulation to (attempt to) solve problems and when you've been swinging a hammer for the past several centuries it doesn't really matter whether the nails you think you're hitting are bolts because you forgot how to turn a wrench long ago.
> We don't even have scooters yet and they're talking about passing regulation in case it becomes a thing.
That's a good thing, not a bad thing. It means your regulators are paying attention to events elsewhere and are trying to proactively prepare for them, rather than flailing about in reaction to complaints and problems. When the scooters come, your jurisdiction will be ready for them, rather than having to ban them just so they can catch up.
As a European I think this is a smart move on the contrary.
Google cannot get rid of the EU market, if it does, EU competitors might have a chance.
So the EU can just tax Google as much as it wants. What are we to be afraid of ? Google leaving EU ? Please do ! This will only gives us a chance to come we our own solution to the web Google&FB think they invented.
I don't get how we could not be glad that we tax more those dystopian companies. Google, FB, etc... don't respect any values of privacy and freedom, they should not have even the right to do what they do in EU and GDPR is step in the right direction for that.
The only problem is that we have no weight if we don't act together, so if some European countries are too short-sighted and put their self little short term interest above the rest and prefer offer encourage Google's development, then yes we will fail.
They have a background, a history. They’ve spent the last 40 years adding layer upon layer of tax and subvention mechanism to try to regulate the economy while solving zero fundamental issues ( unemployment, industry, global private sector attractivness, education and recently even healthcare).
The only thing they’ve managed to do is to increase the cost of the public sector. So yes, indeed i don’t have any kind of trust in their ability to understand pretty much anything.
Why shouldn't the bureaucracy be fed? These companies make money off of it.
I don't see any justification for your position besides a nebulous wish for Europe to have an equivalent of google/facebook, and to be honest, besides adding an extra line on all those "european unicorn" blog posts, i don't see much advantage to it either. There's obviously positives to more profitable businesses - but why another google/facebook?
Whether this policy is good or bad will depend on the details. But generally, in Europe, this kind of priposal is a populism magnet and a dancefloor for cheap politics.
"Standing up to multinational corporations and making them pay their fair share (ra! ra!)" is exactly the type of rhetoric our most generic politicians love.
An American equivalent might be some "government out of your hair" initiative to reduce professional liscencing.. or somesuch.
Once you've got something like that on the table, all the cheapest politicians come out of the woodwork.
On a serious not though, I think it's a good idea if (and only if) this names and addresses the problem which this actually intends to fix: company tax.
Companies have always been difficult to tax properly for 2 reasons. (1) "profit" is whatever your accountant says it is, and this is a manipulatable figure. (2) companies operate in multiple tax jurisdictions. Between these two things, these companies don't pay tax. Besides denying the taxman her due, this gives bigger piles of money and advantage over smaller ones. Not fair. Sad.
I just don't see how modern democracies can address something like this. It's at the nexus of all the things we suck at (politically) at the moment. Cheap idealogy, corporate interest groups, and complicated systems.
This is because taxing profit is a very bad idea. It leads to situations where two companies doing exactly the same thing pay different taxes because one uses less efficient (and often more polluting) technology or just chooses to buy luxury cars for the employees instead of showing profits. The tax on profits is a tax on honesty in accounting and even if accountats are honest it's still impossible to determine fair value of things like offshore licensing.
Once you accept taxing corporate profit is a very bad idea the solutions magically appear: tax consumption and things we don't want (pollution, land usage etc.) It's very easy to make consumption tax progressive if you want that (higher rates for luxury goods, refunds up to X amount per month, funding social services with it etc.).
There is no reason to debate what a company based in country at the end of the world should pay or how your neighbors choose to tax their companies. If they do business in your country the revenue is collected by consumption tax. If your country is nice to live in people will move and pay tax there. The incentives are right for the politicians: make your country businesses friendly and a nice place to live and for the companies who move to places which are more business friendly and better to operate in as tax rate isn't an issue anymore - everyone sets their consumption tax rates and everyone who sells there must oblige.
The countries setting their corporate tax to near 0% have the right idea. I hope they won't be bullied of their position.
Can you have a progressive consumption tax though? Because otherwise the average corporation would have to pay a lot more in consumption taxes vs corporate taxes to keep things revenue neutral.
Except we're not talking about a far country in a galaxy far, far away, but a close ally that actively benefits from the advantages of being a close ally, while pulling bad tax tricks that are detrimental to the countries that allow it to thrive.
It's not about fixing the Bahamas here.
I do agree with your first sentence though, whether this is good or bad depends on the particulars.
I doubt that some data centers make much of a difference. Those tend to be employ maybe two cleaners, one depressed robot and one or two jaded administrators, plus their pot dealer.
They also don't buy anything locally, except electricity at negotiated prices close to or below the costs of production. Maybe they lead to some earnings/profits to be at their location? Considering the issue discussed here, I doubt that.
Well pointed out, consumer prices are irrelevant here.
Having said that, EU law is supposed to prevent governments from propping up local industry.
Can anyone expand on which knobs an EU country is allowed to fiddle in order to attract these types of projects? I believe tax breaks and direct subsidies are not allowed.
Good for them. France and Germany take endless steps to protect their domestic economic interests regardless of what any EU legislation or sense of fairness says, Ireland is well within their rights to do the same.
> France and Germany take endless steps to protect their domestic economic interests
It's not even that in this case, because it's not like there are serious European competitors to these companies (except maybe the odd Samwer clone here and there) that could even be protected. This is purely an attempt to rip these companies off, because the governments can.
Ireland have already been given some lucky charms by the EU. For example, they were given permission to set their corporate taxes to a ridiculously low 12.5%.
The way to go Ireland. A ridiculously stereotypical statement from the French finance minister:
“It just remains for me to offer Paschal a beer in a Dublin pub, and then I think we’ll be able to move toward a decision,” he said, referring to his Irish counterpart, Paschal Donohoe
I don't really see it that way, to me it sounds like he's trying to sound like he wants to have a friendly discussion with the Irish finance minister (and not sound too coercive or aggressive). People routinely drink beer in Parisian bars and pubs as well, if he's playing on an Irish stereotype it's a very mild one.
This is from earlier this year, so the debate may have progressed since then, but Sweden and Denmarks' concerns seem to stem from the way in which the EU aims to apply the tax.
>“A digital services tax deviates from fundamental principles of income taxation by applying the tax on gross income, i.e. without regard to whether the taxpayer is making a profit or not,” Swedish Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson, and her counterparts from Denmark and Finland, Kristian Jensen and Petteri Orpo, said in a joint statement on Friday.
The article doesn't say why Denmark, Ireland and Sweden opposed, but from a referenced article [1]:
> Spearheaded by France, the plan has met resistance from countries such as Ireland and Sweden, which question the wisdom of the EU going it alone given the global nature of digital services.
First, not all services are digital, especially not Amazon packages.
Second, the "global nature" is a technological aspect. The corporations themselves are local to some jurisdiction, as are their clients.
This argument is similar to computing in the "Cloud": Technologically, the service is perhaps global, but the physical manifestation of it certainly isn't. That data center is located somewhere, and when it goes down, one is reminded of the limitations of the "global" aspect.
>> The corporations themselves are local to some jurisdiction, as are their clients
My latest invoice from AMZN says "Sold by Amazon EU S.à r.l., UK Branch". Amazon EU S.à.r.l. is based in Luxembourg.
My order was one (single) LTO cleaning cartridge. Does anyone here think that cartridge even went anywhere near Luxembourg at any point between manufacture and reaching me?
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the sole reason multinational corporations can avoid paying taxes, that they “have to” pay surprisingly large royalties to some sister company in a tax haven that “owns” all the rights to the mother company’s trademarks and other IP? Isn’t this the reason that a company like Google mysteriously isn’t able to turn a profit in most European countries? And if I’m right, couldn’t we make that illegal? Couldn’t we for instance require a company to prove that the IP it licenses is owned by someone who is not controlled by the same entity that it is itself controlled by?
But they should be able to pay something to sister or parent company because they actually use the software developed there. The question is how much. Probably not all of the profits. I guess it's really hard to determine and define strict and fair rules in this area.
It is rather likely that the intellectual property for the google or Starbucks brand or the work that led to Pfizer patents etc were not developed in Bermuda, Bahamas or Panama. It’s hard to exactly apportion where but rather easy to point out that near-zero IP work was done where it was declared to be taxable.
If we were talking about something that had a non-zero marginal cost such as tangible goods or services, I would tend to agree. The problem with (or benefit of, depending on your perspective I guess) IP is that apart from a fixed upfront investment (which granted can be substantial), it costs nothing to "produce" or transfer. Allowing a company to in effect pay licenses to itself, is therefore IMHO nothing but an invitation to the company to choose where it wants to get taxed.
I wonder if those sales could be force to an open market. A bit like anti trust laws.
I'm sure they would pay a lot more for their trademarks if other companies could otherwise snitch it for like a year.
Or why not having to accept or at the least pay taxes on the best offer you get, when you want to sell to some IP and later lease it from some other company?
Yes, that seems unrealistic. It might at least be possible to use this in e.g. the court of law to test for abuse.
I feel that if that law was to pass, the affected companies would simply add that 3% tax to the prices European consumers pay, especially since this is a tax on the revenue and not on profit.
It's not like US tech giants have much competition to fear from European companies anyway. A 3% price increase isn't going to get anyone to switch to another service (except maybe in the case of Amazon's physical sales).
In the end, consumers would pay and this would add to the already large price difference between the EU and the US, due to the much higher applicable VAT in the EU, as well as other similar taxes applied in some EU countries (private copying levy [0], eco-participation [1]...).
It‘s interesting to note, albeit probably being irrelevant here, that both Sweden and Denmark are not in the monetary union (Euro) and have certain priviliges in certain areas of EU law (like the UK has).
Readit News
That will solve absolutely NOT A SINGLE ISSUE , but it’s just another income to feed the bureaucracy.
Thanks to the three countries that stopped this madness.
PS : i also find it outrageous that gafa don’t pay taxes, but let’s fix the tax heavens in Europe then. Don’t start making special taxes on revenue ffs.
EDIT : changed "income" to revenue.
>They’re just a bunch of jealous incompetent insufferable pompous politicians than don’t understand a thing about the private sector
Talking about knee-jerk reactions.
I strongly dislike this type of empty populist diatribe, that's how we give up on democracy and end up with incompetent fools at the government, just out of spite. Screaming "tous pourris" is not improving anything and is frankly insulting for the many elected officials who are genuinely trying to improve things. Regardless of what they did or didn't do there would be people like you who scream bloody outrage because they're obviously stupid people who understand nothing about nothing. Meanwhile you're not the one trying to balance the budget of a country within the EU.
>let’s fix the tax heavens in Europe then
And how do you propose we do that? Have Le Maire go to the various tax heavens (which in this particular instance would have to include Ireland) and tell them to tax more? How many bottles of Bordeaux would he have to bring to seal the deal?
Having a uniform tax code across the EU would be awesome but it's not like we're anywhere close to something like that.
This revenue tax won’t change anything. It’s just ransom, and i hate feeling like my representatives make me look like a lazy thief.
I’d even prefer something like what china is doing : since google is a monopoly in europe, which makes it impossible for competitor to compete, let’s impose tarifs or prevent them from doing business in europe as long as they haven’t split, or a true local competitor has emerged. At least this would be very specific to one very particular case. Not the kind of gigantic tax on a whole economy.
the ability of member states to set their own taxes is about the only protection they have handling down turns and getting new industry. their currency was given up and without the ability to print money they need other means to mitigate adverse changes to their economies. it is one reason Greece was trapped so long in their misery, bound up by EU laws and stuck with a currency they had no control over.
In the US it works by forcing states to compete on regulation and taxes which benefits everyone. because onerous taxation on one group will certainly follow with others because once that line is crossed it becomes to easy to keep doing so. Indirect taxes are a politicians best friend because you have ready bogeymen and no apparent affect on the public though in reality they are paying the end result
Also, why is it wrong to tax the income of corporations?
Dead Comment
Taxing on revenue means a corporation that actually loose money because its expenses (salaries, investmenst, etc) are larger than its sales would still have to pay taxes, making it loose even more money. It doesn't make any kind of sense unless you're targeting a very particular set of companies that you know are making money. In which case you're taxing those companies, but you're also creating a law that makes it almost impossible for new companies to start competing.
Folks that work low-wage or volunteer jobs would suddenly have negative income. The only viable jobs left would be bankers and software developers.
Deleted Comment
They just have no clue about what to do so they try to tax it.
Well, guess what, people who actually want to achieve something productive, who want to make a good living, who want to start a company and not see our profits taxed again and again to feed a bunch of bureaucrats who have never even run a business before, those people they have already left and they are not coming back.
Ireland has been busted (among others) for secretly passing sweet taxation deals with Google, Facebook, Amazon & co. According to you, that's the way to do it, right ? Tax race to the bottom, give deals to big player that no small company has hope to ever negociate, that's sure to bolster competitors. Any kind of attemp to level the playing field by applying tax uniformly on the European level is "sick".
That is 100% uninformed nonsense.
If you are conflating it with Apple vs EU, you can read this primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_State_aid_case_agai...
Nothing to do with a country offering a multinational a deal which results in a lower effective tax rate, and is something _EVERY_ country in Europe offers.
That's a good thing, not a bad thing. It means your regulators are paying attention to events elsewhere and are trying to proactively prepare for them, rather than flailing about in reaction to complaints and problems. When the scooters come, your jurisdiction will be ready for them, rather than having to ban them just so they can catch up.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/companies-pull-scooters-off-sf-str...
Google cannot get rid of the EU market, if it does, EU competitors might have a chance. So the EU can just tax Google as much as it wants. What are we to be afraid of ? Google leaving EU ? Please do ! This will only gives us a chance to come we our own solution to the web Google&FB think they invented.
I don't get how we could not be glad that we tax more those dystopian companies. Google, FB, etc... don't respect any values of privacy and freedom, they should not have even the right to do what they do in EU and GDPR is step in the right direction for that.
The only problem is that we have no weight if we don't act together, so if some European countries are too short-sighted and put their self little short term interest above the rest and prefer offer encourage Google's development, then yes we will fail.
The only thing they’ve managed to do is to increase the cost of the public sector. So yes, indeed i don’t have any kind of trust in their ability to understand pretty much anything.
I don't see any justification for your position besides a nebulous wish for Europe to have an equivalent of google/facebook, and to be honest, besides adding an extra line on all those "european unicorn" blog posts, i don't see much advantage to it either. There's obviously positives to more profitable businesses - but why another google/facebook?
Some Europeans want in on the industrial surveillance tech complex profit machine.
Deleted Comment
"Standing up to multinational corporations and making them pay their fair share (ra! ra!)" is exactly the type of rhetoric our most generic politicians love.
An American equivalent might be some "government out of your hair" initiative to reduce professional liscencing.. or somesuch.
Once you've got something like that on the table, all the cheapest politicians come out of the woodwork.
On a serious not though, I think it's a good idea if (and only if) this names and addresses the problem which this actually intends to fix: company tax.
Companies have always been difficult to tax properly for 2 reasons. (1) "profit" is whatever your accountant says it is, and this is a manipulatable figure. (2) companies operate in multiple tax jurisdictions. Between these two things, these companies don't pay tax. Besides denying the taxman her due, this gives bigger piles of money and advantage over smaller ones. Not fair. Sad.
I just don't see how modern democracies can address something like this. It's at the nexus of all the things we suck at (politically) at the moment. Cheap idealogy, corporate interest groups, and complicated systems.
Once you accept taxing corporate profit is a very bad idea the solutions magically appear: tax consumption and things we don't want (pollution, land usage etc.) It's very easy to make consumption tax progressive if you want that (higher rates for luxury goods, refunds up to X amount per month, funding social services with it etc.).
There is no reason to debate what a company based in country at the end of the world should pay or how your neighbors choose to tax their companies. If they do business in your country the revenue is collected by consumption tax. If your country is nice to live in people will move and pay tax there. The incentives are right for the politicians: make your country businesses friendly and a nice place to live and for the companies who move to places which are more business friendly and better to operate in as tax rate isn't an issue anymore - everyone sets their consumption tax rates and everyone who sells there must oblige.
The countries setting their corporate tax to near 0% have the right idea. I hope they won't be bullied of their position.
Many countries apparently nice to live in are doing their best to keep people out.
those purchases are taxed as income
Wouldn't the same argument hold for income tax then?
I mean, I can evade income tax to a certain extent by making my boss buy me a nice car, computer, bicycle etc.
It's not about fixing the Bahamas here.
I do agree with your first sentence though, whether this is good or bad depends on the particulars.
They have definitely been wooed to denmark, labour and consumer electricity prices are some of the highest in the world.
https://facebook.com/OdenseDataCenter/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-denmark/apple-to-bu...
https://stateofgreen.com/en/partners/state-of-green/news/goo...
They also don't buy anything locally, except electricity at negotiated prices close to or below the costs of production. Maybe they lead to some earnings/profits to be at their location? Considering the issue discussed here, I doubt that.
You just wrote the plot to The New IT Crowd..
Eh, I've always seen them more as Kryten than Marvin.
due to taxes which companies don't pay, so that doesn't matter.
Look at the following graph (you need to expand it). Denmark has the lowest prices. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263262/industrial-sector...
Price of electricity in Denmark is less than 51% of the price in Ireland!
Having said that, EU law is supposed to prevent governments from propping up local industry.
Can anyone expand on which knobs an EU country is allowed to fiddle in order to attract these types of projects? I believe tax breaks and direct subsidies are not allowed.
Deleted Comment
It's like they have a vested interest, or something.
It's not even that in this case, because it's not like there are serious European competitors to these companies (except maybe the odd Samwer clone here and there) that could even be protected. This is purely an attempt to rip these companies off, because the governments can.
“It just remains for me to offer Paschal a beer in a Dublin pub, and then I think we’ll be able to move toward a decision,” he said, referring to his Irish counterpart, Paschal Donohoe
I'd be interested to here their objects if anyone can point at a fuller article or discussion of the issues.
>“A digital services tax deviates from fundamental principles of income taxation by applying the tax on gross income, i.e. without regard to whether the taxpayer is making a profit or not,” Swedish Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson, and her counterparts from Denmark and Finland, Kristian Jensen and Petteri Orpo, said in a joint statement on Friday.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-digital-tax/nordic-cou...
Deleted Comment
> Spearheaded by France, the plan has met resistance from countries such as Ireland and Sweden, which question the wisdom of the EU going it alone given the global nature of digital services.
First, not all services are digital, especially not Amazon packages.
Second, the "global nature" is a technological aspect. The corporations themselves are local to some jurisdiction, as are their clients.
This argument is similar to computing in the "Cloud": Technologically, the service is perhaps global, but the physical manifestation of it certainly isn't. That data center is located somewhere, and when it goes down, one is reminded of the limitations of the "global" aspect.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-05/eu-s-divi...
My latest invoice from AMZN says "Sold by Amazon EU S.à r.l., UK Branch". Amazon EU S.à.r.l. is based in Luxembourg.
My order was one (single) LTO cleaning cartridge. Does anyone here think that cartridge even went anywhere near Luxembourg at any point between manufacture and reaching me?
I doubt it.
I'm sure they would pay a lot more for their trademarks if other companies could otherwise snitch it for like a year.
Or why not having to accept or at the least pay taxes on the best offer you get, when you want to sell to some IP and later lease it from some other company?
Yes, that seems unrealistic. It might at least be possible to use this in e.g. the court of law to test for abuse.
It's not like US tech giants have much competition to fear from European companies anyway. A 3% price increase isn't going to get anyone to switch to another service (except maybe in the case of Amazon's physical sales).
In the end, consumers would pay and this would add to the already large price difference between the EU and the US, due to the much higher applicable VAT in the EU, as well as other similar taxes applied in some EU countries (private copying levy [0], eco-participation [1]...).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Éco-participation
We don't pay for Google with money but with our privacy. I'm perfectly fine with making my privacy more expensive to buy for Google.