14 ms·

France Proposes an Internet Tax

49 points by atestu 14y ago

rtpg 14y ago
> That state of affairs upsets France’s policy makers, as public finances have been stretched thin and French Internet companies struggle to gain traction. and you wonder why.... Seriously, France makes it very hard for small business owners to exist. Either you are a tiny single-owner, or you're a big corporation, but the fixed costs to going from single owner to limited liability is pretty intense. That and all the smart people get convinced to become bankers or managers, while all the motivated (in terms of coding) people go into the abysmal university system. The ultimate irony is that the grandes ecole system seems like the perfect storm to create some very intelligent entrepreneurs, but these students (technically incompetent but motivated and competent on a management level) are in completely different schools from the people with actual know-how , who get forced into consultancies mainly, to write Java enterprise code for the rest of their lives.
- carlob 14y ago
  Why would you call the French academic system abysmal? My experience of it was quite positive (granted I was in a grande école). Also I don't understand why you say that the students graduating from grandes écoles are technically incompetent. I believe they've produced a ton of world class scientists and engineers: last year's Physics' Nobel prize winner, half of the last batch of Fields medallists to name a few…
  - freehunter 14y ago
    What I understood from his post was that he's saying the schools the business guys attend and the schools the technical guys attend are different, so you don't get a mix of the two that would lead to great things. Not that all students graduating from grandes ecoles are technically incompetent, just that some of them are, from specific schools, and some others are business-incompetent.
    - carlob 14y ago
      Well then that's just inaccurate there are a lot of technically inclined managers coming out of École Polytechnique. If one really wanted to criticize the way these manager-engineers are educated I'd say they are too geared towards the public sector and large enterprises, but that's the aim of these schools anyway: to educate the highest ranking civil servants.
      - rtpg 14y ago
        Polytechnique is one school that takes in 200 people a year. And they're definitely a different beast, mainly by the fact of being some of the smartest people in the country. But people going to Polytechnique are going there to become businessmen, rarely (if ever) to get their hands dirty in technical stuff. Their life is pretty well set from that school.
        carlob 14y ago
        Make that 500. Isn't it comparable to MIT that takes about 1000 undergraduates a year? Normalize by country population and you'll see that MIT is even more selective.
  - Raphael_Amiard 14y ago
    > Also I don't understand why you say that the students graduating from grandes écoles are technically incompetent. I believe that this is a false statement regarding the domains of physics, mathematics, or general engineering, but i think the level of engineers out of grandes ecoles in comp-sci and programming is really far from stellar, being easily surpassed by students out of universities. I actually had a few courses at Telecom Paristech : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech The level of the exams was quite low compared to anything i had at university. The course itself was as most of the courses i had at university, quite good technical and theoretical content, very bad pedagogy, and utterly terrible practice projects. A quick glance at what is available at top american universities convinced me that this is a real problem in French comp-sci education. See thoses courses for an example of what i mean when i think "good practice projects": http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-828-operating-system-engineering-fall-2006/assignments/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero
    - Wilya 14y ago
      The demand for people with good applied computer science skills in France is very low, from what I have seen, so that's kind of understandable that there are no courses for that. On the one hand, the pure coding and enterprise tasks are given to people from lower tier/more specialized schools, who are less expensive but mostly lack the advanced comp-sci knowledge. On the other hand, people in pure research fields don't care about your applied skills.
    - gommm 14y ago
      Anecdotally, I went to a Grande Ecole studying Computer Science: INSA of Rennes and I was an exchange student at RIT in rochester. The level of the classes and exams at RIT was much lower than what I had back in france (and a lot of exams had rote learning at RIT, I remember questions like: Which companies drafted the openGL specifications? which is beyond useless and stupid.) The examples of practice projects you listed for OS and compilers are similar to what we did. We also had a fourth year practice project that lasted all the year in a 6 students team and which was really interesting: we were working on a cross platform networked Tarot game with an expert system implemented in Prolog. It was really fun :-) Of course, it also depends on the grande école or university you go to and I'm quite sure that for example MIT is much better than RIT for example.
  - rtpg 14y ago
    Maybe I should clarify: The french university system is abysmal. The grande ecole recruits all the best minds, and these schools make for very good members of society, but it comes at the cost of specialisation. These people get maybe 1 or 2 years at most of actual specialisation. Basically people getting out of these schools are very smart and know a bit about very many domains. It's just that, for having spent 5 years in the school system, they'll know a lot less about their domain than others having spent 5 years in an american university (for example). In 99% of cases this is not important. You learn everything on the job anyways, and people going through the grande ecole system makes you very good at learning quickly and effectively. It's just that while in school you might be a bit useless, and when you get into the workforce, you'll end up with a pretty cushy job anyways.
    - carlob 14y ago
      Fair enough French _universities_ are pretty bad. So what? How do they compare with non-elite American universities? There is a large movement of entrepreneurs in the US that are encouraging bright students to drop out of college, because they think that college has become completely ineffective in teaching useful work skills. Maybe it's because of overspecialization. I don't want to defend the French system, which I sincerely despise for political reasons (this two tiered system is an important cause of social injustice in France), but the American academic system doesn't seem to compare favorably with it, especially in comp-sci curricula.
- p4bl0 14y ago
  You obviously don't know anything about the French academic system and grandes écoles. Or you are being hypocritical. Anyway, back to the subject. The idea behind all this is the following: there are a number of activities, for instance the press, which suffers from the internet. People read the news online and don't subscribe to paper press anymore. They also don't want to pay to much for reading the online press. To get good articles in the papers, you need to pay professional journalists. So the conclusion is that the press industry needs to find a new business model. As it happens, there are companies making fortunes on internet, and their business largely depends on the contents that is created by others. This is particularly true with Google and the press industry. If you see it that way, it seems only fair that Google participate in paying the journalists producing quality content that makes people use their search engine and/or see their ads. Now the question is, how to achieve this? Let the situation evolves and see what happens? This would lead to the decline in quality of the article in the press and eventually to entire journals disappearing, except for some of them for which some private groups have invested in. This is not something that we want because private interest and information don't mix well together. It is the case that many journals are in (sometimes big) part financed on public fund, so the other solution is to augment those public funding, and have the government take care of collecting the money. This is done using taxes. I hope this makes the intention clearer to those of you who don't live in France.
  - bitcartel 14y ago
    Many US and British newspapers are behind a paywall. Are any French newspapers trying this? What have their results been like?
  - outside1234 14y ago
    That is just crazy. If the papers need to raise money to pay journalists, they should put up paywalls. This is working at the New York Times, so why not in France?
  - jsnell 14y ago
    I hear the automakers are also really suffering. And Google is deriving all kinds of value from them. Lots of people will use a search engine to research any car buying purchase, and those searches will monetize extremely well. So clearly the tax should be doubled, and the other half used for subsidizing the French car industry. Surely anybody can agree that it's for the common good to ensure that the French industrial base isn't further eroded.
ntumlin 14y ago
This is a bit scary. I hope it doesn't give any other countries some ideas. Would there be anything Google could do to counter this?
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  The thing they did with China? Move their french "operations" to Monaco (domain and stuff), serve their audience from "there" and sit on that.
  - antr 14y ago
    I'm pretty certain Monaco goes online via France, no submarine cable available. I guess this would be a futile move.
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      I don't think that network topology is terribly relevant here. International law is.
      - antr 14y ago
        If law is the tool to tackle this issue (which I agree it is), the EU should really handle this. What Google and other corporations are doing is avoiding taxes on economic activities going on in EU territory. This is the real problem, paying no taxes while creating a trade balance deficit. These two is what make governments angry.
      - outside1234 14y ago
        I agree - and this is a clear import duty on a product. Hence France should be referred to the WTO to remove it.
- outside1234 14y ago
  Yes - they make the point of sale in Ireland (I suspect they are already doing this) so that no money ever lands in France.
chmod775 14y ago
I just quickly had to check that again: Google is making about $30 on average for every person living in France. Even taxing Google alone 5-8% would earn France a significant amount of money, not to speak of all the other large companies making tons of dollars in online business. Fascinating.
- newbie12 14y ago
  Check again. Google's revenue in France is $2 billion, but their overall gross profit margin is little more than half that...so roughly they are making $15 per French citizen.
  - nraynaud 14y ago
    check again, their declared revenue in France is disputed by the tax service. So you can't compute with published figures.
    - tomjen3 14y ago
      Of course you can. The tax service lies.
- outside1234 14y ago
  This is an import duty exactly like charging 5-8% on wine and cosmetic sales in the US. Also, I'd be surprised to learn that Google is actually collecting money in France as opposed to Ireland based on the way I've seen almost every other software company structured. So I'd suspect that the revenues in France are essentially 0.
iamben 14y ago
What would be the economic impact to French business if Google (and by extension anyone else that would get taxed) didn't provide their free services? I'd guess considerably more than the revenue they make?
- jobigoud 14y ago
  Absolutely. It's ridiculous (and I'm french). Nobody is forcing anyone to use Google services. However, there is indeed an ongoing war between Google and the major ISP over bandwidth costs. "Free" one of the major ISP says that Google should pay a bit more for the massive bandwidth taken by YouTube. Last week or so, they made a silent remote update to all their router with an automatic filtering out of all Google ads. That time it's the government that thought it was a bit too much. War I tell you.
  - revelation 14y ago
    That war will be quickly over once Google blocks Free internet users. If ISPs are hellbent on making internet access a premium product with various feature sets and tiers and segregation, let them have it. Your post is missing the critical two words net neutrality (which is what we want) and douple dipping (which is what ISPs want).
ernesth 14y ago
First, I don't think that what Amazon, Google and others do is just "seen as tax avoidance". Their scheme is clearly devised to minimize taxes they pay in countries where taxes are high and pay most taxes in Ireland and Luxembourg where they are lowest. UK also remarked it and is searching for ways to counteract it. Second, this idea is just an idea, not a law project or proposition. There have been reports as official as this one inciting free downloading and instead, we got hadopi law... Third, I find this idea quite interesting (at least new). It is quite different from other internet taxes (Germany's google tax for example) in that it gives a reason for taxation other than the worsening of old businesses. The real idea being that the exchange of personal information for internet services is a trade that needs not be untaxed, as barter can be taxed.
rgo 14y ago
Governments around the world have been suffering the "Not Taxed Here" syndrome for a long time. Companies making money across borders can pay their corporate taxes elsewhere, wherever is more convenient, sometimes in the US, sometimes in Ireland, etc. This is not specific to Google or Facebook. There are many evasive tricks, most of them legal, like having headquarters charge branches a high price for "services and goods" therefore drying up local profits. [1][2] The online advertisement business is just another disruption on the "tax industry". Taxes on a global market are a doomed business. Bring these corporate practices effectively into the public eye and negotiate from there. Foster competitiveness. But don't push yet another distorting set of laws onto an already high pile of bureaucracy. [1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57544873-37/apples-taxes-on-overseas-profits-last-year-less-than-2-percent/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57544873-37/apples-taxes-o... [2] http://www.ifoapplestore.com/2012/05/23/spain-retail-financials-reveal-controversial-accounting/ http://www.ifoapplestore.com/2012/05/23/spain-retail-financi...
- mongol 14y ago
  Indeed. Especially common it seems to be to make a subsidiary in one country pay another company a license fee for using the brand. But making legal hurdles against moving profits this way is not something I am against, I find it more fair if profits are taxed where they are made rather than one country making all tax profits on the expense of others. But the legal construction should be simple, make sense, and be effective. Not so easy to achieve.
at-fates-hands 14y ago
To me this is fairly obvious. Their economy is collapsing and they're trying desperately to raise additional revenue to avoid a situation like Greece. Since their economy is based on the Euro, they can't print their way out of debt like we do here in the USA. Thus, they need to find alternate ways to generate revenue.
yanw 14y ago
So France wants to tax Google for indexing newspapers, and as recently as this month there were talks about a tax to "compensate" telecos for delivering YouTube clips. Now they come up with a "personal data" tax scheme targeted at Google: is it just the case that people who really hate Google were voted into power?
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >is it just the case that people who really hate Google were voted into power? It really seems that way. I mean how else can you explain that all of their ideas are so stupid. As a general rule, if you're trying to scheme up some way to "get" Google, stop. Think first. The first question you should ask is: What will this do to companies that compete with Google? Will it bankrupt them? Give Google an advantage over them, because its large legal staff can better navigate the law, or take advantage of economies of scale? Because if it does, and your aim is to hurt Google, you've failed. All it does is strengthen their market position and increase their likelihood and ability to diverge from their "don't be evil" roots and embrace the dark side. I mean just think about this tax for two seconds: Never mind the complete inability to administer it (how do you collect the tax from a company with zero business presence in France whose site is still visited by French users? Or do they get a pass, causing websites to flee the country en masse?), what does this do to the incentives of the legislature? Now their tax revenue is based on companies collecting personal information from users. Anything that would stop or even slow that down is now a significant "cost" to the legislature because it reduces the revenue the tax generates, so I hope none of you ever wanted to see any internet privacy regulation again. It really seems like these people don't even think for one second before they open their mouths.
- mertd 14y ago
  > people who really hate Google I don't think they hate it. They are just incompetent and desperate for reducing deficit. They see that Google has a lot of money and scheme to take some it.
martinced 14y ago
There's already an Internet tax. Anyone in France who pays an ISP to provide an Internet connection pays VAT to the french state. So it's really: "France proposes yet another Internet tax (and shall still be unable to reach budget equilibrium because of the ineffiency of its army of overpaid state-workers providing really-not-much to its citizens)".
- camus 14y ago
  That's France , they dont know how to put people back to work , but they sure know how to tax everything out of existence , the results are simple : every new tax cent from businesses is paid by the final consumers one way or another, so prices are sky rocketing, making the poor poorer. France needs revenue it's true (and also cut spending big time), but needs to create good jobs first, and make it less risky(and painfull) for a startup to hire people. Population is getting older , and rightfully we need to take care of old people , who is going to pay for all that welfare stuff ?, not businesses , they are leaving France and are right to do so
  - martinced 14y ago
    I know... I pity you if you're still in France. Do like me: I moved to Brussels. And I'll move further away if they try to take more liberties away from me. I hate socialists and communists and I'll go as far as needed as to not see them in power (Belgium is a bit special in that there are always coalitions of six, seven, eight political parties ruling the country... Including both liberals and socialists. So Belgium is safe for now). Come here, it's a good place to be.
gst 14y ago
So what is France going to do with Internet companies that don't have any offices in France (and that just ignore this tax)? Just block their websites?
mehdim 14y ago
France propose to tax companies which don't open API of personal data they collect http://api500.com/post/40846639254/taxing-companies-which-dont-have-open-apis http://api500.com/post/40846639254/taxing-companies-which-do... This is not an Internet Tax...

49 points by atestu 14y ago

rtpg 14y ago

> That state of affairs upsets France’s policy makers, as public finances have been stretched thin and French Internet companies struggle to gain traction. and you wonder why.... Seriously, France makes it very hard for small business owners to exist. Either you are a tiny single-owner, or you're a big corporation, but the fixed costs to going from single owner to limited liability is pretty intense. That and all the smart people get convinced to become bankers or managers, while all the motivated (in terms of coding) people go into the abysmal university system. The ultimate irony is that the grandes ecole system seems like the perfect storm to create some very intelligent entrepreneurs, but these students (technically incompetent but motivated and competent on a management level) are in completely different schools from the people with actual know-how , who get forced into consultancies mainly, to write Java enterprise code for the rest of their lives.

carlob 14y ago
Why would you call the French academic system abysmal? My experience of it was quite positive (granted I was in a grande école). Also I don't understand why you say that the students graduating from grandes écoles are technically incompetent. I believe they've produced a ton of world class scientists and engineers: last year's Physics' Nobel prize winner, half of the last batch of Fields medallists to name a few…
- freehunter 14y ago
  What I understood from his post was that he's saying the schools the business guys attend and the schools the technical guys attend are different, so you don't get a mix of the two that would lead to great things. Not that all students graduating from grandes ecoles are technically incompetent, just that some of them are, from specific schools, and some others are business-incompetent.
  - carlob 14y ago
    Well then that's just inaccurate there are a lot of technically inclined managers coming out of École Polytechnique. If one really wanted to criticize the way these manager-engineers are educated I'd say they are too geared towards the public sector and large enterprises, but that's the aim of these schools anyway: to educate the highest ranking civil servants.
    - rtpg 14y ago
      Polytechnique is one school that takes in 200 people a year. And they're definitely a different beast, mainly by the fact of being some of the smartest people in the country. But people going to Polytechnique are going there to become businessmen, rarely (if ever) to get their hands dirty in technical stuff. Their life is pretty well set from that school.
      - carlob 14y ago
        Make that 500. Isn't it comparable to MIT that takes about 1000 undergraduates a year? Normalize by country population and you'll see that MIT is even more selective.
- Raphael_Amiard 14y ago
  > Also I don't understand why you say that the students graduating from grandes écoles are technically incompetent. I believe that this is a false statement regarding the domains of physics, mathematics, or general engineering, but i think the level of engineers out of grandes ecoles in comp-sci and programming is really far from stellar, being easily surpassed by students out of universities. I actually had a few courses at Telecom Paristech : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech The level of the exams was quite low compared to anything i had at university. The course itself was as most of the courses i had at university, quite good technical and theoretical content, very bad pedagogy, and utterly terrible practice projects. A quick glance at what is available at top american universities convinced me that this is a real problem in French comp-sci education. See thoses courses for an example of what i mean when i think "good practice projects": http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-828-operating-system-engineering-fall-2006/assignments/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero
  - Wilya 14y ago
    The demand for people with good applied computer science skills in France is very low, from what I have seen, so that's kind of understandable that there are no courses for that. On the one hand, the pure coding and enterprise tasks are given to people from lower tier/more specialized schools, who are less expensive but mostly lack the advanced comp-sci knowledge. On the other hand, people in pure research fields don't care about your applied skills.
  - gommm 14y ago
    Anecdotally, I went to a Grande Ecole studying Computer Science: INSA of Rennes and I was an exchange student at RIT in rochester. The level of the classes and exams at RIT was much lower than what I had back in france (and a lot of exams had rote learning at RIT, I remember questions like: Which companies drafted the openGL specifications? which is beyond useless and stupid.) The examples of practice projects you listed for OS and compilers are similar to what we did. We also had a fourth year practice project that lasted all the year in a 6 students team and which was really interesting: we were working on a cross platform networked Tarot game with an expert system implemented in Prolog. It was really fun :-) Of course, it also depends on the grande école or university you go to and I'm quite sure that for example MIT is much better than RIT for example.
- rtpg 14y ago
  Maybe I should clarify: The french university system is abysmal. The grande ecole recruits all the best minds, and these schools make for very good members of society, but it comes at the cost of specialisation. These people get maybe 1 or 2 years at most of actual specialisation. Basically people getting out of these schools are very smart and know a bit about very many domains. It's just that, for having spent 5 years in the school system, they'll know a lot less about their domain than others having spent 5 years in an american university (for example). In 99% of cases this is not important. You learn everything on the job anyways, and people going through the grande ecole system makes you very good at learning quickly and effectively. It's just that while in school you might be a bit useless, and when you get into the workforce, you'll end up with a pretty cushy job anyways.
  - carlob 14y ago
    Fair enough French _universities_ are pretty bad. So what? How do they compare with non-elite American universities? There is a large movement of entrepreneurs in the US that are encouraging bright students to drop out of college, because they think that college has become completely ineffective in teaching useful work skills. Maybe it's because of overspecialization. I don't want to defend the French system, which I sincerely despise for political reasons (this two tiered system is an important cause of social injustice in France), but the American academic system doesn't seem to compare favorably with it, especially in comp-sci curricula.
p4bl0 14y ago
You obviously don't know anything about the French academic system and grandes écoles. Or you are being hypocritical. Anyway, back to the subject. The idea behind all this is the following: there are a number of activities, for instance the press, which suffers from the internet. People read the news online and don't subscribe to paper press anymore. They also don't want to pay to much for reading the online press. To get good articles in the papers, you need to pay professional journalists. So the conclusion is that the press industry needs to find a new business model. As it happens, there are companies making fortunes on internet, and their business largely depends on the contents that is created by others. This is particularly true with Google and the press industry. If you see it that way, it seems only fair that Google participate in paying the journalists producing quality content that makes people use their search engine and/or see their ads. Now the question is, how to achieve this? Let the situation evolves and see what happens? This would lead to the decline in quality of the article in the press and eventually to entire journals disappearing, except for some of them for which some private groups have invested in. This is not something that we want because private interest and information don't mix well together. It is the case that many journals are in (sometimes big) part financed on public fund, so the other solution is to augment those public funding, and have the government take care of collecting the money. This is done using taxes. I hope this makes the intention clearer to those of you who don't live in France.
- bitcartel 14y ago
  Many US and British newspapers are behind a paywall. Are any French newspapers trying this? What have their results been like?
- outside1234 14y ago
  That is just crazy. If the papers need to raise money to pay journalists, they should put up paywalls. This is working at the New York Times, so why not in France?
- jsnell 14y ago
  I hear the automakers are also really suffering. And Google is deriving all kinds of value from them. Lots of people will use a search engine to research any car buying purchase, and those searches will monetize extremely well. So clearly the tax should be doubled, and the other half used for subsidizing the French car industry. Surely anybody can agree that it's for the common good to ensure that the French industrial base isn't further eroded.

ntumlin 14y ago

This is a bit scary. I hope it doesn't give any other countries some ideas. Would there be anything Google could do to counter this?

guard-of-terra 14y ago
The thing they did with China? Move their french "operations" to Monaco (domain and stuff), serve their audience from "there" and sit on that.
- antr 14y ago
  I'm pretty certain Monaco goes online via France, no submarine cable available. I guess this would be a futile move.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    I don't think that network topology is terribly relevant here. International law is.
    - antr 14y ago
      If law is the tool to tackle this issue (which I agree it is), the EU should really handle this. What Google and other corporations are doing is avoiding taxes on economic activities going on in EU territory. This is the real problem, paying no taxes while creating a trade balance deficit. These two is what make governments angry.
    - outside1234 14y ago
      I agree - and this is a clear import duty on a product. Hence France should be referred to the WTO to remove it.
outside1234 14y ago
Yes - they make the point of sale in Ireland (I suspect they are already doing this) so that no money ever lands in France.

chmod775 14y ago

I just quickly had to check that again: Google is making about $30 on average for every person living in France. Even taxing Google alone 5-8% would earn France a significant amount of money, not to speak of all the other large companies making tons of dollars in online business. Fascinating.

newbie12 14y ago
Check again. Google's revenue in France is $2 billion, but their overall gross profit margin is little more than half that...so roughly they are making $15 per French citizen.
- nraynaud 14y ago
  check again, their declared revenue in France is disputed by the tax service. So you can't compute with published figures.
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    Of course you can. The tax service lies.
outside1234 14y ago
This is an import duty exactly like charging 5-8% on wine and cosmetic sales in the US. Also, I'd be surprised to learn that Google is actually collecting money in France as opposed to Ireland based on the way I've seen almost every other software company structured. So I'd suspect that the revenues in France are essentially 0.

iamben 14y ago

What would be the economic impact to French business if Google (and by extension anyone else that would get taxed) didn't provide their free services? I'd guess considerably more than the revenue they make?

jobigoud 14y ago
Absolutely. It's ridiculous (and I'm french). Nobody is forcing anyone to use Google services. However, there is indeed an ongoing war between Google and the major ISP over bandwidth costs. "Free" one of the major ISP says that Google should pay a bit more for the massive bandwidth taken by YouTube. Last week or so, they made a silent remote update to all their router with an automatic filtering out of all Google ads. That time it's the government that thought it was a bit too much. War I tell you.
- revelation 14y ago
  That war will be quickly over once Google blocks Free internet users. If ISPs are hellbent on making internet access a premium product with various feature sets and tiers and segregation, let them have it. Your post is missing the critical two words net neutrality (which is what we want) and douple dipping (which is what ISPs want).

ernesth 14y ago

First, I don't think that what Amazon, Google and others do is just "seen as tax avoidance". Their scheme is clearly devised to minimize taxes they pay in countries where taxes are high and pay most taxes in Ireland and Luxembourg where they are lowest. UK also remarked it and is searching for ways to counteract it. Second, this idea is just an idea, not a law project or proposition. There have been reports as official as this one inciting free downloading and instead, we got hadopi law... Third, I find this idea quite interesting (at least new). It is quite different from other internet taxes (Germany's google tax for example) in that it gives a reason for taxation other than the worsening of old businesses. The real idea being that the exchange of personal information for internet services is a trade that needs not be untaxed, as barter can be taxed.

rgo 14y ago

Governments around the world have been suffering the "Not Taxed Here" syndrome for a long time. Companies making money across borders can pay their corporate taxes elsewhere, wherever is more convenient, sometimes in the US, sometimes in Ireland, etc. This is not specific to Google or Facebook. There are many evasive tricks, most of them legal, like having headquarters charge branches a high price for "services and goods" therefore drying up local profits. [1][2] The online advertisement business is just another disruption on the "tax industry". Taxes on a global market are a doomed business. Bring these corporate practices effectively into the public eye and negotiate from there. Foster competitiveness. But don't push yet another distorting set of laws onto an already high pile of bureaucracy. [1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57544873-37/apples-taxes-on-overseas-profits-last-year-less-than-2-percent/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57544873-37/apples-taxes-o... [2] http://www.ifoapplestore.com/2012/05/23/spain-retail-financials-reveal-controversial-accounting/ http://www.ifoapplestore.com/2012/05/23/spain-retail-financi...

mongol 14y ago
Indeed. Especially common it seems to be to make a subsidiary in one country pay another company a license fee for using the brand. But making legal hurdles against moving profits this way is not something I am against, I find it more fair if profits are taxed where they are made rather than one country making all tax profits on the expense of others. But the legal construction should be simple, make sense, and be effective. Not so easy to achieve.

at-fates-hands 14y ago

To me this is fairly obvious. Their economy is collapsing and they're trying desperately to raise additional revenue to avoid a situation like Greece. Since their economy is based on the Euro, they can't print their way out of debt like we do here in the USA. Thus, they need to find alternate ways to generate revenue.

yanw 14y ago

So France wants to tax Google for indexing newspapers, and as recently as this month there were talks about a tax to "compensate" telecos for delivering YouTube clips. Now they come up with a "personal data" tax scheme targeted at Google: is it just the case that people who really hate Google were voted into power?

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
>is it just the case that people who really hate Google were voted into power? It really seems that way. I mean how else can you explain that all of their ideas are so stupid. As a general rule, if you're trying to scheme up some way to "get" Google, stop. Think first. The first question you should ask is: What will this do to companies that compete with Google? Will it bankrupt them? Give Google an advantage over them, because its large legal staff can better navigate the law, or take advantage of economies of scale? Because if it does, and your aim is to hurt Google, you've failed. All it does is strengthen their market position and increase their likelihood and ability to diverge from their "don't be evil" roots and embrace the dark side. I mean just think about this tax for two seconds: Never mind the complete inability to administer it (how do you collect the tax from a company with zero business presence in France whose site is still visited by French users? Or do they get a pass, causing websites to flee the country en masse?), what does this do to the incentives of the legislature? Now their tax revenue is based on companies collecting personal information from users. Anything that would stop or even slow that down is now a significant "cost" to the legislature because it reduces the revenue the tax generates, so I hope none of you ever wanted to see any internet privacy regulation again. It really seems like these people don't even think for one second before they open their mouths.
mertd 14y ago
> people who really hate Google I don't think they hate it. They are just incompetent and desperate for reducing deficit. They see that Google has a lot of money and scheme to take some it.

martinced 14y ago

There's already an Internet tax. Anyone in France who pays an ISP to provide an Internet connection pays VAT to the french state. So it's really: "France proposes yet another Internet tax (and shall still be unable to reach budget equilibrium because of the ineffiency of its army of overpaid state-workers providing really-not-much to its citizens)".

camus 14y ago
That's France , they dont know how to put people back to work , but they sure know how to tax everything out of existence , the results are simple : every new tax cent from businesses is paid by the final consumers one way or another, so prices are sky rocketing, making the poor poorer. France needs revenue it's true (and also cut spending big time), but needs to create good jobs first, and make it less risky(and painfull) for a startup to hire people. Population is getting older , and rightfully we need to take care of old people , who is going to pay for all that welfare stuff ?, not businesses , they are leaving France and are right to do so
- martinced 14y ago
  I know... I pity you if you're still in France. Do like me: I moved to Brussels. And I'll move further away if they try to take more liberties away from me. I hate socialists and communists and I'll go as far as needed as to not see them in power (Belgium is a bit special in that there are always coalitions of six, seven, eight political parties ruling the country... Including both liberals and socialists. So Belgium is safe for now). Come here, it's a good place to be.

gst 14y ago

So what is France going to do with Internet companies that don't have any offices in France (and that just ignore this tax)? Just block their websites?

mehdim 14y ago

France propose to tax companies which don't open API of personal data they collect http://api500.com/post/40846639254/taxing-companies-which-dont-have-open-apis http://api500.com/post/40846639254/taxing-companies-which-do... This is not an Internet Tax...