> Well, that's not clear. Now I get your point. Of course the ratio of servers in a given country should not be the basis of taxation. The situation of these l

> Well, that's not clear. Now I get your point. Of course the ratio of servers in a given country should not be the basis of taxation. The situation of these large companies is they have a web of shelf companies just to optimise their taxes. E.g. neither Facebook nor Google or Apple does their core business activity and R&D in Ireland or formerly in Luxembourg. They simply extract the profit on arbitrary measures. In classical companies (manufacturing, automotives, media, etc) when there is a holding company, usually there is a realistic “commission” that the child companies keep on sales revenue, e.g. 40%. This is an extrapolated number to a company level based on what the company would pay to an individual salesman in commission. There are holding companies for intellectual properties in the UK, e.g. ARM or WPP, BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, etc. If you are interested, I'd have a look to their quarterly financial reports to see how they divide the profit among their subsidiaries. But, we can reverse the question: how less would be the revenue if Facebook or Google would have no office presence in the country? If they can answer this question (and they do when they make their quarterly financial reports), then it is easy to measure how much tax is fair to pay. > I would argue that it's this dizzying maze of laws that causes these problem Sure, fewer laws the better. Yet, safe havens for stashing money from questionable sources are individual cases. Their economy is based on extracting money made in other countries and the tourism related to stashing the money. There are plenty of whitepapers with ideas how to resolve this situation, yet nothing happens, because the people who can make it happen, personally are not interested in it.