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0 pointst0mas885y ago0 comments

You could argue that taxes were designed before the "you are the product" age. If Apple sells a phone in Australia to a local customer, they pay Australian sales tax and possibly import dues to get the phone into the country. When Facebook sells data from an Australian user to a random advertiser, all tax is due in Ireland/Netherlands or some other tax haven and Australia makes nothing.

So while this approach with news media is a strange one, I think there is an argument to be made for taxing things differently. Make Facebook/Google pay a fair tax in all countries they're active in. Then each country can decide how they want to use that, if a democratically elected government in Australia wants to subsidize news using taxes they should be able to do so.

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pochamago5y ago

While you're right that there's a reasonable argument, I can't say it's one I agree with. I already strongly dislike the change in US tax law that now requires all e-commerce companies to adjust their sales tax based on the location of the consumer. It added a bunch of new bureaucratic overhead for us on top of negating one of the competitive fringe benefits of having a business in a small state instead of California. And it mostly just seems arbitrary to me which way that tax swings, rather than intrinsically fair.

t0mas88OP5y ago

True, the US sales tax thing is a great case-study on how it doesn't work. Taxing revenue probably also doesn't work due to large differences in margin. If you tax 1% on the revenue of a 1.5% margin kind of business it sounds rather unfair, charging a 1% revenue tax on a business with 90% margin sounds low.

So indeed there is no clear simple implementation strategy for this yet.

worik5y ago

Tax revenue, not profits, is a potential solution

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