I use a road to get to work. My work pay my salary. My salary pays amazon for crap delivered to my house. The package comes delivered on the same road. The internet connection I used to visit amazons page is delivered via fiber to my house, funded just like other infrastructure. So the road and fiber was very important for my society being a developed high-income one, which is why I'm buying crap from the internet in the first place.
However, the topic here is the indirect benefit of being a wealthy nation where you can have customers wealthy enough to care about your products in the first place. The argument is that this is the result of something the society or the government did and it whoever benefits from that must pay their share for the access to that benefit, possibly to keep or improve the conditions that lead that wealth in the first place.
These countries have mostly tax financed universities free or only with nominal tuitions for students. Without such education system the internet companies would have few customers wealthy enough to create a lot of profit for the company.
But if that US business goes to France and sells to French customers there, then it should pay French taxes in France on the profits made from French customers. All loopholes should be removed.
What happens is that corporate taxes ultimately come from the pockets of customers. Either those companies will raise prices or lower their profits. Either way this will help local companies that currently can't exploits loopholes to pay no taxes and are at an unfair disadvantage. Somebody could see it as protectionism, I think the existence of those loopholes is a bug that has to be fixed.
