Europe’s Tech Tax Is a Mistake in the Making
If France and Germany cared about efficient and equitable taxation, they’d drop their planned “Google tax.”
Not a warm welcome in Hamburg.
Photographer: Bodo Marks/DPA/Getty Images
One way or another, Europe is determined to get tech companies to pay their fair share. All that remains is to decide the meaning of “tech company,” “pay,” “fair” and “share.”
After months of talks, France and Germany have proposed a plan to tax big digital companies 3 percent of their Europe-based advertising revenue. This is a scaled-back version of a broader European Commission effort, and its very specificity is telling: In effect, it taxes only two companies — U.S. bêtes noires Google and Facebook — suggesting that fairness wasn’t the designers’ overriding concern.