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Comment by BillyParadise | Hacker News Reader

Agreed re. contractors. When you use the Uber app, you pay Uber. Not Joe Shmoe and his nice newish car. Therefore the HST should be payable, to Uber.

In turn, drivers who earn > $30k should provide their HST number to Uber, and Uber should be billed HST in remittances.

In turn, drivers can write off HST paid on all business-related expenses.

Yay, Value Added Taxes.

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Stripe, Square? What makes Uber different from payment processors with built in fraud protection layers?

Consumers never buy anything from Stripe or Square.

Consumer buy ride services from Uber.

So Etsy should be charging GST and every other marketplace app out there. Uber is a broker not a transportation company. Other than their self driving experiments, they don't operate a single car.

Does Etsy tell people which doodads to crochet, then kick them off if they make different ones?

No, Uber is not a marketplace. Uber is a consumer product. Uber designs the product and sets prices. Driver's can't compete with each other and I can't 'shop around' on Uber to find a different deal.

If Uber switches to (self driving) cars that Uber owns itself, how does that change the sales tax model? The product is still essentially the same, the consumer still pays Uber, tax shouldn't change here. The backend shouldn't dictate whether sales tax is applicable here.

Etsy is a general marketplace and should handle sales tax/GST just like Amazon does. Which it does.

Of course Uber is a marketplace. A marketplace doesn't need the ability to set prices individually. Abiding to pricing standards are the conditions to offer your services on their particular marketplace. Don't make up rules that don't exist.

but I can't "shop around" on Uber. I don't get a choice of who provides me a service.

The concept of Uber being a marketplace is utterly ridiculous.

Uber controls the cost of goods/service.

When I buy a book from Amazon, I pay Amazon, not the seller. Therefore, the seller is an employee of Amazon.

When you buy a book from a seller on Amazon, who sets the price?

Very often Amazon

Just as you'd expect if Amazon was a physical bookstore - the store sets the price. Did you think authors were employees of Barnes and Noble?

That wasn't the question.

> When you buy a book from a seller on Amazon, who sets the price?

The answer is that the seller always sets the price. Sometimes the seller is Amazon itself, and other times it's not.

Right, so if you buy a book from Amazon, and then pay your credit card bill a month-something later, that means Amazon and the seller are employees of Visa. Wherever the end-user sends money is the employer; that's it.

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