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> How about a 100% tariff on Office 365, Windows, AWS, Azure, etc? What would be the plan exactly here? These services are being sold by European-based compani
by michpoch 2y ago
> How about a 100% tariff on Office 365, Windows, AWS, Azure, etc?
What would be the plan exactly here? These services are being sold by European-based companies and being served from European territory (eg AWS Frankfurt). There’s no import happening here.
In general it makes sense to tariff something that you can replace. E.g. tariff American eggs, so suddenly it makes more sense to import them from Peru.
If you put a 100% import tax on Windows license, the only result is that the EU customers are now paying double the price for Windows. It’s very unlikely it’ll result in people switching to an alternative system.
Same with AWS - even if you’d tariff all American cloud companies, what result would you expect? Sure, in X years maybe you’d grow an EU cloud company, but until then you’d make every European business using cloud very uncompetitive globally.
You use tariffs to prop up the companies you already have. You could put “tariffs” on Apple Music, so people would move to European Spotify.
- Marsymars 2y ago> You use tariffs to prop up the companies you already have. You could put “tariffs” on Apple Music, so people would move to European Spotify. Not just the music providers, you could go after American IP and effectively stop international payments to American movie/music/film providers. You could bootstrap the music part from Spotify - i.e. just prohibit Spotify from remitting any licensing fees for American-owned IP. Like when Antigua had the WTO ruling around piracy: https://torrentfreak.com/antiguas-legal-pirate-site-authorized-by-the-world-trade-organization-130128/ https://torrentfreak.com/antiguas-legal-pirate-site-authoriz...