Writing tax laws effectively is hard, just like writing effective and secure code that will be publicly accessible is. You have to think about edge cases, not

Writing tax laws effectively is hard, just like writing effective and secure code that will be publicly accessible is. You have to think about edge cases, not introduce race conditions, handle buffer overflows. And the people trying to find bugs are extremely motivated! An EU commissioner or some junior bureaucrat in Brussels has no incentives for quality drafting. They won't get a bonus if tax revenues go up by 10%, and they don't get much help to review drafts. They want to do a good job, sure, but they also want to go skiing, or have a cold, or want to catch up on Black Mirror. Apple, Google, and Facebook each have very strong incentives to examine the law and identify ways to optimize their position. They can and do pay their employees, law firms, accounting firms, and other consultancies VERY large fees. Tax work to identify overspend (a shipment had the wrong tax category applied and was charged a higher rate, for example) typically earns 33% commission, as just one example. You can just rule by decree, but then you drop all pretence of being a government of laws. You have to explain, in detail, what an internet company is, how you will categorize revenue, how you will attribute it to a certain country, etc etc. For the EU, sure they don't have many big Internet firms. But they sell lots of cars, shoes, clothes, wine, robots, trains, etc to the US. They are putting all of that at risk to satisfy the pique of Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck. Trump's off the cuff tariffs are stupid and counter productive. So are the EU's attempts to hobble Google and Ireland.