jandrewrogers parent
Revenue (not profit) taxes have a bad history and are generally abhorrent because they incentivize many suboptimal things both in theory and practice. Trying to impose this kind of tax on companies that have no meaningful presence in your jurisdiction, subjecting them to these perverse incentives, is going to invite significant backlash. Everything about this seems foolish and poorly thought out.
Think of it as sales tax for b2b transactions. It's a giant hole in most countries' taxation schemes, where b2c transactions are taxed, but b2b are entirely tax-free.
Are you claiming that Google, Meta and Amazon don't have a meaningul presence in Italy? They're free to not serve their content there then.
That's not the problem. You can't tax Google profit in Italy. It's an American company. You can apply sales tax and custom duties, however. This is what this "tax" is. But because of the WTO, they couldn't apply duties, so they are twisting the story.
The WTO agreements and institutions are due to collapse in the next 2-4 years (and nope, am not saying that, see Macron latest interview about cars).
i think you are confused.
It's not about taxing an american company, it's more about taxing an irish company
America was only actually relevant to their point because it is not Italy. Ireland is also not Italy so their point works equally well with America replaces with Ireland.
I thought they mentioned Ireland because of the recent Apple EU tax ruling. Google is also using the Irish tax avoidance strategy.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/top-eu-c...
The issue, which has been raised in diplomatic discussions on this matter, is that multiple countries are claiming the same revenue as “domestic” and wish to tax it simultaneously. This quickly becomes untenable and isn’t a good look for tax policy.