You Think Google Search Is Free? Austria Seeks to Tax It Anyway
- Social Democrats eye levy on ads, taxes on digital ‘barter’
- Austria says 1 billion euros lost to corporate tax loopholes
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Austria is seeking ways to make digital services like Alphabet Inc.’s Google or Facebook Inc. pay taxes for transactions with the nation’s internet users, trying to plug gaps in a tax system still designed for brick-and-mortar business.
The most ambitious part of the plan targets the business models of Twitter Inc., Google or Facebook: The tacit pact under which searching, liking, posting and tweeting remains free as long as users let the companies feed usage data into algorithms that help tailor advertising that can be aimed at the most likely buyers.