Is this then to counter tax avoidance by companies that conveniently transfer the profits out of the country? "Oh no we made a loss in France so no tax to pay in France because we had to pay our Irish subsidiary €1bn for digital services".
I don't know if this is one of those cases but governments are generally trying to figure out how to avoid such transfers away of tax revenue.
> It feels absurd to punish data heavy companies. What a weird proxy disciminator. Makes so little sense.
This is part of the net-0 narrative and the degrowth movement that's been growing(no pun intended) in Europe. Nevermind that growth in the EU is already pretty low to begin with...
There was a blast of anti-datacenter either propgoanda or just incredibly bad science, a bit before the AI craze, where they took the total amount of internet traffic, the total amount of data center energy usage, then said, well, netflix is x% of bandwidth so it must be x% of energy usage too.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/industries-in-depth/carbon-f...
In the spirit of radical misunderstanding I assume this ridiculous proposition is continuing to be foisted upon people. A "Badhearts Law" (riffing Goodheart's "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") if you will: finding a bad measure to make bad accusations.
(The idea that AI is going to pay a heavy tax or even medium tax for this seems like some super wishful thinking.)
Dear Netflix, my startup is Uber but for carrier pigeons. Carrying SD cards! With AI-optimized routing because I gotta mention AI somewhere...