Germany’s federal commissioner for media and culture, Wolfram Weimer, told Stern magazine on Thursday that the new government is drafting a digital levy on global internet platforms, although alternatives like a voluntary commitment by the affected tech companies to pay more tax in Germany are also still under consideration.
The beauty of the free market - either do what the capitalist class does or die, freely.
If I point a gun at you and ask for your wallet, you can voluntarily give it to me, but that doesn't make it less of a robbery.
Here's a (somewhat clumsy, but still gets the point across) translation of the lyrics https://lyricstranslate.com/en/meine-freiheit-deine-freiheit...
How about we talk openly about it- there is a limited number of perfectly good heads- and fabrication industries and service industries are in systemic competition on that limited pool. And they create their own support environment ("bloated universities") where the service wins and destroy the competition.
The lure of USA protection lingers in Eastern Europe - some just haven't realized the new reality yet.
Obviously Czechoslovakia has a great excuse, not having existed for 32 years, but neither Czechia nor Slovakia come close to Ireland, either is terms of Euro-value or number of software jobs.
Ireland's software exports dwarf Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and the Baltics combined. That's ignoring the inflated GDP figures from international IP revenue tax-dodging.
The days of the Double Irish are long gone and comparing effective tax rates paints a very different story, so this is 5 years out of date in as true as it ever was.
Even excluding the EU IP revenue of multinationals with EMEA HQs in Ireland, real software development revenue is over double Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and the Baltics combined.
But that's irrelevant, as ghost HQs can avail of Ireland's tax regime with minimal employees.
Ireland's extremely educated workforce and exceptionally stable and peaceful governance along with business friendly economic climate are the reason Ireland is a software powerhouse, independent of tax regime (which is not particularly conducive to large employers).
Also there are quite a few successful gaming companies in central and eastern Europe - like CD project (Witcher/Cyberpunk) in Poland and Factorio, Mafia, Kingdom Come from Czech Republic.
Also on the IT driven services are there are quite big companies like like Alza/Allegro (eq. local Amazon), Seznam (eq. local Google), Windy (weather), etc.
My child was born in NZ and in order to gain dual citizenship you need to submit form in Lithuanian.
To access e-gov you used to have so many cool methods - most popular is your bank (makes sense since they’d have highest stakes and worked out security), then your local SIM card finally your ID card. Well first ones are off the table since I was away for so long. I managed to source a usb smart card reader. Even somehow more luckily find working software. By shred of luck my card is not expired (card is valid for 10years, but digital certificates on chip for 18 months lol).
I’m in. The digital form is ok, albeit designed before mobile era so definitely won’t work in mobile screen. Fine. Submit it. Two weeks later I get a response (clearly my form was just dumped as an email) that in fact I need to meet face to face to ID me and my child…
Fortunately thru personal connections I was able to do so via video call.
Contrast that to NZ. In 10 years here I didn’t get to meet beurocrat even once. I’ve mailed a form and received passport by post. Low tech but sublime experience.
I dont believe anything in my comment stated the contrary.
I pointed out this wouldn't be tariffs since it's not on physical goods, hence the comparison you made doesn't really make sense.
The technicalities of whether it's "tax" or "tariff" is irrelevant, in the context they both bring about the same desired outcome.
I skipped right past it because I understood what GP was getting at, and saw no need to get pedantic over the wording.
On the other hand, blanket tariffs levied on countries rather than specific industries don’t look like they serve a specific industrial policy.
Also, if you look at manufacturing, Europe still provides some essential things. SAP, a German company, is a global market leader in ERP and related software. Companies like Tesla buy high their high tech machines from Germany. And the machines that make the chips that are power the AI revolution are made by ASML, headquartered in the EU. US manufacturing is a lot weaker than EU manufacturing at this point.
So, I don't think it is that black and white and there are a lot of things in the US that aren't necessarily very modern or nice.
And for taxation, there's the argument to be made that there are an awful lot of US companies with extreme valuation rivaling the GDP of most EU countries that seem to be very good at dodging taxes in the EU despite getting a lot of their revenue there. There's a lot of talk about trade imbalances lately, and this has been an obvious candidate for balancing. So, I don't think this is such a strange thing to do for the EU to be publicly musing doing something about that in light of all the tariffs that Trump is threatening with currently.
Which is of course what this is all about.
In short: suck it up big tech; please go harder governments.
> In short: suck it up big tech; please go harder governments.
Meanwhile EU is trying to undermine security of all citizens and Meta is promoting it.
‘ProtectEU’ security strategy: a step further towards a digital dystopian future https://edri.org/our-work/protecteu-security-strategy-a-step...
WhatsApp Goes All In on Privacy with ‘Not Even WhatsApp’ Campaign https://the420.in/whatsapp-not-even-whatsapp-privacy-campaig...
The privacy stuff is typical PR and marketing. They say it’s good for privacy because that’s what people want to hear. After the Snowden leak revelations and CryptoAG, it seems incredibly naive to look at any mass-communication platform from a US company with anything short of suspicion. The only question is whether or not there is somehow a backdoor for the actual encrypted message but US intelligence doesn’t really need that, anyway.
The EU is a complex political body. Parts of it are trying that, lobbied by a toxic American big tech corporation. A corporation that carelessly enabled genocide in Myanmar, btw, so it won’t certainly have any qualms about steering a foreign political body towards its own goals.
For every 1 "tech company" founded in Europe, there are 5 more of the same founded in the US.
So objectively, it appears more countries agree with my subjective judgement than not.
UK already has ludicrously, insanely generous tax-breaks on small scale venture funding (SEIS), fully 1/3 of the world's top ten universities within a small radius (and another fifty great ones), first-rate banking services, strong rule of law, and pretty limited bureaucracy (outside of land planning).
"All" it needs to do is build enough houses and stop obsessing about immigrants...
No need to make it so complicated, if a company have revenue above X billion then pay X% tax on the revenue local or global revenue.
It would be reduced. The profit can’t be 100% of their German as revenue because obviously they have costs elsewhere. But the argument of some countries is now that it also can’t be 0%.
Not sure in what world Merz's coalition could ever be considered centre-left. It's a coalition of the conservative party (which moved much further right under his leadership) and the centrist Social Democrats (who equally moved to the right/center under current and former leadership). Calling them "centre-right" could perhaps be acceptable, all while "conservative" is also a widespread label.
For instance in France, at this point, the National Rally (Le Pen) is not really more in the right than the traditional conservative/right wing party was in the 70s and 80s (with years in government). It is plainly just "the right" and largest party in Parliament, yet they are labeled dangerous far right extremists because it is (less and less) helpful politically...
Not sure exactly how the political positioning is in Germany but overall "far right" and "right-wing extremists" have lost all meaning generally in Europe because those terms are so abused. The current German government coalition does not seem to particularly reflect the democratic result of the latest election (majority on the right), same as in France.
How did the SPD move to the right? By forming a coalition with the CDU? That claim sounds very dubious to me..
I think this is a “shot across the bow” for companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
France have already started to implement their version of this digital tax.
The U.S. is pressuring EU companies to follow their drive for removing anti-discrimination policies.
Europeans are starting to notice this unbalanced relationship, where the U.S. doesn’t believe it needs to follow the same rules it tries to dish out to other countries.
Make US business in our countries pay their way and follow our laws. That’s the very basis of sovereignty.
...but what do I know, I'm just a semi-retired, blue-collar electrician — chatting since GPT-2.
saubeidl•1d ago