Yeah, honestly, that's what I hope they do. The amount of entitlement and this holier than thou attitude among the media is pretty annoying. Figure out how to make money like any other business. And if you can't, we'll then I guess you don't matter that much.
An amusing angle on this situation. If you go back thirty or twenty years, it is hard to think of an industry better-positioned to capture the momentum of the internet than the news media.
(1) They had teams of people producing regular fresh content, to a high quality.
(2) They had existing subscriber bases, which could have been converted to other purposes (consider the online dating services offered by some of the UK newspapers.)
(3) They had existing economies of scale from business lines which were not dependent on the internet, buffering them against dot com downturns and the like.
(4) Several of them had other divisions producing other good content. e.g. motion picture rights.
(5) They had international presence, and internal connectivity.
(6) Many had existing consumer-connectivity through cable relationships.
Yet. None created geek-friendly workplaces, they were too tied to their cash cows, and they have done badly.
I would 100% support this mindset if tech giants paid taxes where they make their money. I don't know what the situation is like in Australia but in Europe it's pretty insane. You can't abuse the system on one side and then argue the "efficient market hypothesis" on the other.
Google&friends are not making money and competing "like any other business".
How does exploiting tax loopholes have anything to do with the success of news media? Arbitrary fines and taxes are one thing. Forcing Google and Facebook to help the news sets a completely new precedent.
Countries are competing in a market for tax revenue too. If a country wants more tax revenue from a business, they can either close the legal loopholes that allow the business to reduce the amount of tax that they pay or make their tax laws more competitive with those of other countries.
I like your comment, not sure if you are joking though. A few decades ago when I started reading William Gibson’s cyber punk sci-fi, I often wondered if the corporate run enclaves in his stories would anticipate real events.
If the police are defunded, I'd bet that private security companies would fill the void and we'd be well on our way to "Stephensonion" being the next "Orwellian"!
Have a look at these. If you can afford to pay lawyers to set schemes up like this, then you are at a competitive advantage against businesses which pay regular tax.
Take the billions of dollars that you've saved from BEPS and use it to subsidize your local products, or run ads attacking the competition, or taking them to court, or hire salespeople, or build new content. Simple.
Several big-enough companies use tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes or lobby the government themselves.
This is not specific to big tech though, it's a single point of failure of having a centralised government that is easily corrupted by rich corporations.
This reads like sealioning. You really can't see why an entity A that gives 1% in taxes is at an advantage in competing with an entity that gives say 20% in taxes?
but this behaviour (as said above) is not unique to tech. All sufficiently large, sufficiently multinational businesses effectively stop paying the full rate of tax
Right and say BMW, VW etc are not doing the exact same thing?
There is trade imbalance between US and say Germany if both sides introduce equivalent measures it will hurt EU more than it hurts US.
BMW and VW are not doing the exact same thing. They pay taxes to the US IRS for their profits made in the US. The argument against Google and Facebook is based on their use of profit-shifting to avoid taxes on European profits.
> They pay taxes to the US IRS for their profits made in the US.
That's plain wrong. Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence. The only difference is that there might be a sales tax for physical goods.
>Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence.
That is not correct. Taxes are payable wherever the profits are made.
It is usually the case that the country where the company is headquartered will have a far greater proportion of profits compared to revenue because a lot of the things that add value happen there, but in the case of large tech companies, this is taken to the extreme, where not just profits, but even revenue itself is shifted from where the business actually happens.
For example, Google reported £1.6bn (US$2.1bn) in revenue and paid £44m ($58m) in corporation taxes (on profits of £231m ($303m) based on a 19% tax rate) in the UK for the 2019-20 financial year, but its actual UK revenue is estimated to be around £5.7b ($7.5b) for the same period.[1]
Whereas car companies have consumers as their customers and have to pay sales tax, AdWords expenditure by businesses is considered a business expense and is not taxed (in the UK). If they played by the same rules, they would have paid around £1.14b ($1.5b; based on 20% VAT) in tax in 2019-20, instead of £44m.
> Taxes are payable wherever the profits are made.
No, with regard to income tax that's simply wrong.
That said, public companies typically have subsidiaries in other countries and these subsidiaries have to pay corporate income tax in their country of residence (but also regardless of where the profits are actually made). This is often used to avoid (or delay) tax payments, especially if the subsidiaries are in low-tax countries.
But if the parent company Apple Inc. sold an iPhone in Germany, they wouldn't have to pay income tax in Germany, just like BMW AG doesn't have to pay income tax in the US.
That's wrong. It's also well known, western companys pay no taxes for factorys in 3rd world countrys since ever. Even they produce real things in a country.
I hear the media say this all around the world all the time, and they of course always mean themselves... But is it true? There are many and many independent reporters with their blogs and twitters (do we call that media?), independent news sites (that probably is media) that are not with the mainstream media on these legal requirements, and actually in my country the mainstream media is so corrupt a half of the population simply does not care about them and get their news from other sources, like blogs and twitter.
Thats fair, and I would question anyone getting all their news from the Daily show or last week tonight. Its incredibly biased.
Australia's problem is that our news orgs are corrupt to the core, every journo is afraid to go against Murdoch in any way shape or form their careers are ended if they do.
So here we are, with this "comedian," doing a better reporting job than pretty much every single outlet in the country. With very few exceptions.
This decision is crony capitalism at its worst.