
From Google to Amazon: EU goes to war against power of US digital giants - rpm4321
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/06/google-amazon-europe-goes-to-war-power-digital-giants
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chris_va
You have to love politicians ability to dissemble and appeal to emotion rather
than just fix the problem.

1) Taxes: This tax structure is legal, and used by the majority of large
international companies operating in the EU. The EU has the power to change
it, if it wants to, rather than just bitch about it. The US will also get its
chance to tax this money, if Google/Amazon ever bring it back into the US (the
US, unlike the rest of the planet, loves to tax companies for money made
elsewhere).

2) Data: Data retention and anonymity is actually fairly regulated by the EU
and the US (sometimes conflictingly). It is again within the power of the EU
to change their regulations, which they have done in the past, instead of just
bitching about it.

3) Antitrust: I like how they play up the search result "alleged" anti-trust
angle. There are anti-trust laws on the books in all of these countries, and
there were even congressional hearings in the US about this topic (which found
nothing). Unless they are implying that the legal system in the EU is broken,
I don't get why the politician is banging the drum on this one.

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DanBC
> This tax structure is legal,

Some corporations really stretch the boundaries of legality. See, for example,
Starbucks. Starbucks (the beanroasters) sell very expensive beans to Starbucks
(the coffee shops). This weird set-up means that Starbucks (the coffee shop)
in the UK makes no profit and thus pays very little tax.

While the company is not evading tax, and will have legal advice telling them
their systems are legal, we don't really know for some of the schemes until
they're tested in court. And it's expensive to take all these very rich
multinational tax-avoiders to court, so we end up with deals being done. (See
Vodafone paying a very small amount of the avoided tax after their scheme was
shut down.)

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chris_va
Starbucks also makes very little net margin the US, and as an entity pays very
little in taxes directly, but that does not mean that the US does not make a
lot of tax revenue from Starbucks.

After cost of goods, the gross margin is spent on operations like payroll,
marketing, logistics, etc. Each entity in the line pays some form of tax (e.g.
VAT in the UK, sales in the US), not to mention the billions in payroll taxes.

It is also surprising that litigation would be seen as so cost-ineffective.
Google gets sued 100s of times per year, and I suspect the UK government would
have a lot more to gain than the typical claimant.

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DanBC
Hang on: In England sales tax - VAT - is a tax paid by the customer (although
collected by the business). That is not Starbucks paying the tax, that's me as
a customer paying the tax.

Similarly for income taxes - I pay those as an employee although it is
collected by the company.

The company makes use of the UK infrastructure (roads; policing; education;
etc) so they should consider paying a bit more tax.

It's worse where a company charges the customer full UK VAT at 20% but pays a
lower rate to some other country. (Not sure if this does actually happen, but
I've heard it does. And I'm not sure if it's an intended part of the laws or a
loophole.)

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chris_va
Maybe this is a semantic issue.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you or Starbucks wrote the UK
government the tax check. None of Starbucks' money started with them, it all
starts with the UK consumer. Without Starbucks the entity, £0 gets paid to the
UK government for both VAT and payroll tax. With Starbucks the entity, a lot
of money gets paid to the UK government. As a result, Starbucks generates a
lot of tax revenue within the UK, regardless of whose name is on the check.

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msh
But the sad thing is that the european alternatives to the sectors they
mention like gmail is either bad or expensive euro hosted american software
(hosted exchange) which is not priced to reach the average customer. I would
prefer a EU alternative to gmail but none exist (by gmail I think of the whole
suite with email, contact and calendar that all have a good webinterface and
at the same time provide good sync to mobile devices).

~~~
fidotron
I completely agree, but the answer as to why not is in the question. People
simply won't pay for it, especially given Gmail etc. is "good enough" and
"free". People here would (understandably) probably not trust anything which
isn't completely open source. Thus the incentives to do it just aren't there.

I've wondered if there is a case that Silicon Valley is guilty of product
dumping when giving services away. Euphemistically this is moat building, but
the reality looks very similar.

This is all why we need an easy to use in the cloud OS that end users can
deploy services on. Detach the app development organisation from the hosting
again. While that link remains the whole thing will remain a mess.

~~~
aragot
I would pay for a non-american webmail, provided the UI is merely as good as
Gmail, which we're too dumb to create.

I would think it's perfectly legitimate if government administrations refused
to communicate sensitive personal information on american email addresses.

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walshemj
Why not go back to a client hosted MUA (thunderbird etc) like we used to do
before gmail.

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msh
For my part, because I need continuous access to all my mail/contacts/calendar
from several mobile devices (phone+tablet) plus several computers.

Before gmail and good mobile devices I used mutt on a shell account to get
access constant access but that was only mail + contacts.

~~~
ulfw
I haven't seen a mobile device that doesn't do IMAP/CalDav and/or Exchange.
Why do you need to go to a website on a mobile device to read your email?

~~~
msh
No, but most webmail providers dont offer calDAV + cardDav or exchange on any
inexpensive account.

The problem is not the device but the providers.

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ulfw
It's about time that something is done about taxation. It can't be that US
companies earn billions of dollars in EU nations but pay almost no tax (either
in the EU or the US).

As a simple employee I cannot evade taxes (and might have to pay double taxes
in the EU and US if I am a US citizen/perm resident working in the EU), yet
large corporations can.

~~~
kghose
See how easily the politicos make it about you against me, when we should be
working together. Dude, if you are European, and you make good software, I'll
use it.

In fact, I use a ton of software made by people who, by chance, were born in
Europe. But the moment you start to rail against 'US companies' (I work in a
US company) I begin to think, waitaminuite, that guy is against me - he wants
to hurt me, maybe I shouldn't use his stuff either ...

~~~
danmaz74
What is actually absurd is that those companies don't pay those taxes in the
US either, because they can keep the money in fiscal havens for ages...

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mike_hearn
No. You read about money sitting in the Caribbean because the US tax system is
broken and tries to tax money made anywhere in the world (this makes no sense,
and no other country does this).

BUT .... that doesn't mean they avoid the US taxes! For Google the money ends
up sitting in Bermuda: not a place noted for its abundance of cheap colo space
or computer scientists. Obviously it isn't going to stay there because there's
nothing to spend it on. Instead the money sits offshore until something more
useful is found.

What US companies _want_ to happen is that the US Govt puts in place a "tax
holiday" in which they temporarily stop being idiots and use the same tax
rules as the rest of the world, thus allowing those companies to move the
money earned abroad back into the USA without it being taxed twice (once by
the country where it was earned and once by Uncle Sam). This has happened
before so they think maybe it'll happen again. Then they can spend it on
building fancy offices and hiring splurges, all of which yields taxable income
inside the USA.

What actually tends to happen is that politicians, even the ones that
acknowledge the sense of this, don't like being seen to give big companies a
tax break. So they prevaricate and eventually the money gets spent abroad in
places like Europe or Asia, where double taxation treaties work properly. At
that point the money gets taxed via payroll taxes, employee income taxes, VAT
etc. Own goal for America.

Still ... the money doesn't sit there because they want to avoid US taxes.
They generally want to avoid double taxation, and then spend the money saved
inside the USA.

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danmaz74
What double taxation? They are NOT taxed in Europe, that's the whole point!!

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mike_hearn
They are indeed taxed in Europe! The rate paid is low (until the money moves
back around) but tax is paid.

~~~
danmaz74
It's not a low rate. It's an accounting trick, which moves almost all the
taxable profits to a fiscal haven, and this is possible exactly because there
is NO double taxation.

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jqm
Email and the like are fairly easy to replace.

The one thing Google has that so far I have not seen seriously challenged is
search. Sure there are other search engines but none really compare in my
experience when it gets down to it.

If you hobble your citizens from performing the best possible searches you are
putting your society at a long term disadvantage in my opinion. Search really
is that important in this day and age.

The answer isn't regulation. The answer is to build a better search engine.

~~~
Omniusaspirer
That becomes tricky when you acknowledge that the primary reason Google search
is fantastic is _because_ they have zero respect for your privacy. You
absolutely have a search profile formed with your browsing history which has a
_massive_ impact on the results you see when searching whatever query.

~~~
mike_hearn
Hardly. Many people use Google search without being logged in at all. Chrome
pioneered the Incognito mode. You can disable web search history (and I have).
There's plenty of respect for your privacy there, you just have to indicate
your preference.

Anyway. Personalisation improves search results somewhat. It does not improve
them as much as, say, a good spelling corrector.

Source: I used to work at Google.

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IBM
Bad for the digital giants and their shareholders, good for the public.

Silicon Valley has skated by with very little privacy regulation, but the tide
is turning.

~~~
maximumoverload
As a citizen of EU, I very much doubt it.

Most of the technical revolutions in the past decade(s) was brought to us by
the giants. Never by the governments.

The most that will happen is more variants of the demented "cookie law" and
"Google deletion law".

~~~
danieldk
On the other hand, the EU has finally brought telco to their knees. We had the
situation where as e.g. a T-Mobile Germany customer, you'd pay exorbitant
roaming fees to use mobile internet or to call on the T-Mobile Netherlands
network. It's still expensive, but getting better by the year, thanks to the
EU intervening in such cases.

~~~
walshemj
But telephony was invented over 100 years ago - and given the USA completey
screwed up telecoms deregulation its a case in the kingdom of the blind the
one eyed man is king.

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Entalpi
I stopped reading after " / ... / data is replacing fossil fuels as the most
valuable resource on Earth.".

~~~
zghst
That is actual an understatement, information has and always will be powerful.
Do you wonder why the US, China and Russia invest so much in spying on each
other and everyone else?

