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Strictly speaking of ads - what happens when someone is using VPNs, let's say because the are contracted by an american company? I like your idea, I'm just cur

Strictly speaking of ads - what happens when someone is using VPNs, let's say because the are contracted by an american company? I like your idea, I'm just curious how this would work? Google might find themselves in violation of the law. What do you think? How about a yearly national tax proportional with the amount ad buyers pay for targeting a country - the argument here is that Google, Facebook, etc. are using a national infrastructure to do their business.

jakubp 9y ago
I don't understand the issue with VPN. The idea would be to tax the profit of an ad company based on the country of origin of the institution buying the service from them (not country of origin of the seller, which seems to easy to game). VPN can shadow users' location, but not corporate location of tens of millions of companies, at least that's my intuition. I don't know anything about policy in general, but I'd rather reconsider existing taxes and their mechanisms before introducing even more taxes. Still, I'm guessing just shifting the taxation based on buyer's location would be groundbreaking, possibly not functional for many companies, and introduce a lot of extra work just to get some money from multinationals.... Yearly national tax probably reflects the instinct many people have, that other companies within these markets are taxed for similar activity, but multinationals aren't, and maybe they are getting too good a deal. There is something similar going on in Poland and I'm guessing many other developing countries: foreign corporations open their shared services centers, recruit really well educated people but get significant tax benefits on this. Also supermarket chains are somehow exempt from some taxation. Supposedly this is to promote jobs locally, but in reality it seems more like a brutal scam: you get great, cheap workforce and do not have to pay as much for access to it in taxes. Multinationals selling globally, but paying taxes where they like is similar. The sentiment among my friends is that the local corporations sucking in workforce, pulling it away from building our own products and services with international potential, AND getting tax deals is quite bad in the long term.

jakubp 9y ago

I don't understand the issue with VPN. The idea would be to tax the profit of an ad company based on the country of origin of the institution buying the service from them (not country of origin of the seller, which seems to easy to game). VPN can shadow users' location, but not corporate location of tens of millions of companies, at least that's my intuition. I don't know anything about policy in general, but I'd rather reconsider existing taxes and their mechanisms before introducing even more taxes. Still, I'm guessing just shifting the taxation based on buyer's location would be groundbreaking, possibly not functional for many companies, and introduce a lot of extra work just to get some money from multinationals.... Yearly national tax probably reflects the instinct many people have, that other companies within these markets are taxed for similar activity, but multinationals aren't, and maybe they are getting too good a deal. There is something similar going on in Poland and I'm guessing many other developing countries: foreign corporations open their shared services centers, recruit really well educated people but get significant tax benefits on this. Also supermarket chains are somehow exempt from some taxation. Supposedly this is to promote jobs locally, but in reality it seems more like a brutal scam: you get great, cheap workforce and do not have to pay as much for access to it in taxes. Multinationals selling globally, but paying taxes where they like is similar. The sentiment among my friends is that the local corporations sucking in workforce, pulling it away from building our own products and services with international potential, AND getting tax deals is quite bad in the long term.