You're right that many businesses will operate in specific markets, but even then it's still not always clear which rate should apply, and different classificat

You're right that many businesses will operate in specific markets, but even then it's still not always clear which rate should apply, and different classifications might apply in different member states or even different areas within the same member state. E-books were a controversial ambiguity when the new rules came in, for example. We could get more into how many technicalities there are in this system, but I think I'm just going to mention that the document you linked there is 116 pages long, which probably says all that needs to be said on that point. As for locations, there are plenty of potential gotchas there too. Would you like to guess the rule if the person who bought an e-book did so while on holiday on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean? And as for not changing very often, I think the shortest notice so far was just over a week from legislating the change to the new rate coming into effect (Greece in summer 2016). To this day, I'm aware of no standardised mechanism for alerting merchants to future changes in the relevant rates, nor any authoritative list of current rates available in a machine-readable format for automation purposes. So while I agree that we shouldn't pretend it's more complicated than it is, the current EU VAT situation is a complete mess full of traps and technicalities to catch out the unwary, and full compliance is effectively impossible. It's a bad system, made by people who don't understand how either digital markets or small businesses actually work.