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Tariffs and such have been used to even the playing field though. When scalability and network effects are strong how would a company in Australia compete with

Tariffs and such have been used to even the playing field though. When scalability and network effects are strong how would a company in Australia compete with the existing players who can structure themselves to pay extremely little tax. If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from?

wutbrodo 7y ago
I'm not a big fan of tariffs in general, and think there are usually better policy tools to achieve the same objective, but they have their place: there are sound reasons to want to retain domestic production capacity in certain industries, while still taking advantage of the efficiency that full nationalization often precludes. It's not entirely unreasonable to include domestic media in this category either. But this set of demands goes far beyond what's required to protect critical domestic production, by explicitly laying out specifics for how the market should be structured: > require the companies to negotiate in good faith on how to pay news media for use of their content, advise news media in advance of algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source news content in search page results, and share data with media companies. On top of that, the doublespeak about the purpose of demands like these rankle me: > Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it. “This will help to create a level playing field,” he said. Paywalls have existed for ages. The notion that "it's only fair" that a business that chooses a business model based on ad revenue also get a government-coerced payout from a third-party is lunatic on its face. Aggregators and referrers like Google and Facebook don't create content[0] and thus aren't eating media companies' lunch; competitors like blogs are. If it's "not fair" that they're paid, why not fund them directly out of the government? > If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from? Are you under the impression that their profits within the country aren't already taxed? The difference here is that the tax receipts are going directly to media companies instead of to the gov't (and the fact that implicit taxes generally don't manage to capture the attention of the uninformed voter, who'd probably be put off by the idea that a tax should be have such narrowly-targeted payers and recipients without being explicitly Pigovian (Eg cigarettes)). [0] Except to the extent that individual posts on Facebook have reduced news consumption, but I'm not sure if that's true

wutbrodo 7y ago

I'm not a big fan of tariffs in general, and think there are usually better policy tools to achieve the same objective, but they have their place: there are sound reasons to want to retain domestic production capacity in certain industries, while still taking advantage of the efficiency that full nationalization often precludes. It's not entirely unreasonable to include domestic media in this category either. But this set of demands goes far beyond what's required to protect critical domestic production, by explicitly laying out specifics for how the market should be structured: > require the companies to negotiate in good faith on how to pay news media for use of their content, advise news media in advance of algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source news content in search page results, and share data with media companies. On top of that, the doublespeak about the purpose of demands like these rankle me: > Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it. “This will help to create a level playing field,” he said. Paywalls have existed for ages. The notion that "it's only fair" that a business that chooses a business model based on ad revenue also get a government-coerced payout from a third-party is lunatic on its face. Aggregators and referrers like Google and Facebook don't create content[0] and thus aren't eating media companies' lunch; competitors like blogs are. If it's "not fair" that they're paid, why not fund them directly out of the government? > If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from? Are you under the impression that their profits within the country aren't already taxed? The difference here is that the tax receipts are going directly to media companies instead of to the gov't (and the fact that implicit taxes generally don't manage to capture the attention of the uninformed voter, who'd probably be put off by the idea that a tax should be have such narrowly-targeted payers and recipients without being explicitly Pigovian (Eg cigarettes)). [0] Except to the extent that individual posts on Facebook have reduced news consumption, but I'm not sure if that's true