For the public, I think this is a non-issue. For Spanish news companies, this will hurt their business and Spain isn’t exactly riding the gravy train these days. The problem with trying to “over-protect” IP is that the grey market ends up getting you.
it would be much simpler and fairer to just make Google pay its fucking taxes.
As far as I know, Google is paying their taxes. If what you mean is that the government should close some of the loopholes that companies like Google use to reduce their tax bill, then I would agree with you.
Google can’t just voluntarily pay more taxes than the rules say they have to. There would be soooo many shareholder lawsuits.
This is my sentiment exactly.
Due to the fact that shareholders can file a lawsuit over a company not maximizing its profits and minimizing its liabilities (including tax liability), no company has any choice but to participate in these loopholes lest they be sued by their shareholders. The only real solution is to close these loopholes.
Take the double Irish that’s being phased out. This was something Ireland opened up to get more high tech multinationals to base themselves there for the European market, and it was a great move. Ireland isn’t the most powerful of economies, and they got themselves in a real good place with it. Now that it’s not as needed, that these tech companies like Google are well-based, they can close it and increase taxes. Some may leave, but I highly doubt that Google will. They will just start paying the higher taxes. Admittedly Google did work to help establish the double Irish, and it hugely benefitted them, but I think in the long run by it attracting the businesses I think it helped out the Irish economy more.
Nobody from Google that I know are saying that they should keep the double Irish. Most are glad to see it go away. It may or may not be too sharp of a cutoff, but either way I don’t care about it that much; I’m just glad to see the double Irish go way at this point, since it’s no longer needed to attract companies to Ireland.
But to say that companies are not paying their taxes when their tax bills are set so low by the government is like saying I’m not paying enough for my dollar cheeseburger. The price was set by the place taking it in.
Now, if we want to get into a discussion about companies meddling with government to get tax breaks, then we have a big thorny issue there. Sometimes I think limited-time tax breaks would be good to get companies into a city/state/country, but I do stress limited-time. Other than that, meddling should be kept low.
Would the restriction cover an app that scrapes and aggregates news sites? As long as the app developer isn’t actually hosting the quoted content, seems like that might be a good dodge.
Cat-herding. They’ll just take another bunch of politicos out for free lunches and factfinding trips. New loopholes will pop out of nowhere to take their place. It’s built into the quantum foam of political economy.
The trouble is that our legislators cost so little. They’re so incredibly cheap. It may be that the only real solution is to pay these jerks so much money that the cost of bribing them becomes so large that it’s effectively impossible.
So what’s the big deal? If the US can do it to foreign nationals (example Kim Dotcom) and companies, then Foreign countries can to it do American nationals and companies.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Spains next move will be to indict the Google execs for closing down the service as a tax dodge and then try to get them extradited.
Let me correct a tiny detail
Article says
The move is meant to make tax-dodging American companies pay back some of the profits they make from EU businesses,
well, that may be the reason for many other things at the EU level, but this? The rationale for this is a simpler one.
The move is meant to give the big media in Spain what they have been asking, because the government wants to keep then happy so they keep writing bullshit about the atonishing Spanish recovery (seen by all pundits and no citizens at all), and also have leverage to ask them to stop covering all the corruption bullshit that is appearing day in day out about how they are a bunch of crooks. As the relationship between media and government is now reduced to not knowing who is a leech of who, and most of the big newspaper just surviving by the “institutional propaganda” contracts of the government, this is just part of the whole setup of you scratch my back, I scratch yours.
Of course, being Spanish politicians and Spanish businessman, they are so fucking idiotic and incompetent that getting what they want is exactly what hurts them.
And the response? AEDE is asking for a judge to rule that Google CANT CLOSE GOOGLE NEWS BECAUSE IT HURTS THEM.
Yep. See what I meant? That is the kind of idiot that run the big media conglomerate here, and the big political party here. The one that think both law and justice are their plantation, as are the Internet and the economy and…
I’m happy to believe in your experience. We’re all fucked.
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