Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

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I mean this is a tax problem first and foremost isn't it? The problem being that it's hard for countries to enforce regulations in a virtualized, globalized economy. It's true that it's not just about tax, you also have issues regarding what is and isn't legal in a given country (nazi apology is illegal in France for instance, but good luck enforcing that on the web. Similarly the super harsh "no nudity" rule on american websites is often seen as abusive over here for instance). I mean you seem to agree on that point yourself so it seems that they're not completely wrong to try and fix that.

>They’re just a bunch of jealous incompetent insufferable pompous politicians than don’t understand a thing about the private sector

Talking about knee-jerk reactions.

I strongly dislike this type of empty populist diatribe, that's how we give up on democracy and end up with incompetent fools at the government, just out of spite. Screaming "tous pourris" is not improving anything and is frankly insulting for the many elected officials who are genuinely trying to improve things. Regardless of what they did or didn't do there would be people like you who scream bloody outrage because they're obviously stupid people who understand nothing about nothing. Meanwhile you're not the one trying to balance the budget of a country within the EU.

>let’s fix the tax heavens in Europe then

And how do you propose we do that? Have Le Maire go to the various tax heavens (which in this particular instance would have to include Ireland) and tell them to tax more? How many bottles of Bordeaux would he have to bring to seal the deal?

Having a uniform tax code across the EU would be awesome but it's not like we're anywhere close to something like that.

I’m pro europe, but let’s face it, if we can’t get any kind of cooperation between state members regarding taxes, then maybe it’s time to rethink the inside mechanicsm of the union ( which may include restart from scratch with fewer countries).

This revenue tax won’t change anything. It’s just ransom, and i hate feeling like my representatives make me look like a lazy thief.

I’d even prefer something like what china is doing : since google is a monopoly in europe, which makes it impossible for competitor to compete, let’s impose tarifs or prevent them from doing business in europe as long as they haven’t split, or a true local competitor has emerged. At least this would be very specific to one very particular case. Not the kind of gigantic tax on a whole economy.

What does Google have a monopoly on? Do you not have access to iOS? Do you not have access to DuckDuckGo and Bing?

http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/eur...

I don't think "monopoly" is best judged by "current market share", but by whether a) it's easy for users to switch, and b) whether having that market share is self-reinforcing in a way that prevents competitors from entering.

The parent's point was that a) is not true for Google as a search engine.

b) doesn't seem to be true either; while money and experience can make you provide better search results, you don't get an advantage just from a high current percentage of searches.

In a trivial sense you can "SilasX has a monopoly on SilasX's labor" or "Joe Schmoe has a monopoly on hot dogs sold at Elm & Main St". That's not the monopoly anyone cares about. What matters is whether it's difficult to bring online the alternatives to employing my labor or buying a hot dog in that vicinity. In that respect, Google's monopoly on search is not the worrisome kind of thing we associate with monopolies.

So what you're saying is it's easy to compete with Google and get some market share in that space?

No.

I'm trying to outline a useful definition of "[bad-]monopoly" that captures the stuff we generally care about when we worry about them.

It's important to have a definition that excludes "they're just unusually good and so people happen to be currently buying from them, purely as an issue of merit". (If Joe happens to be the best hot dog vendor on some intersection, that's different than if he can prevent others who want to from opening shop nearby.)

I said Google doesn't count as the kind of bad-monopoly because they're easy to switch away from, and the market share isn't self-reinforcing.

It doesn't follow that Google is easy to take market share from. That could be the case of "legitimately good at what they do", and is not how you should define a worrisome monopoly.

A company being so good that others can't gain market share isn't (necessarily) a bad-monopoly. Only if that difficulty came from the factors above, would it count as a bad-monopoly.

(Those factors being the vendor lock-in and the self-reinforcing aspect.)

He's saying that (1) they have a horizontal monopoly, but not a vertical one. And (2) the monopoly is due to Google's quality. Should they do a subpar job, they would be disrupted.

You are a lot more economical with words than me :-)

b) whether having that market share is self-reinforcing in a way that prevents competitors from entering.

The argument is that large market share cause user capture. It is relative trivial to bring online an alterative youtube, but video creators can't switch unless the audience also switch and the audience can't switch unless the creators also switch. A subpar job by youtube won't automatically mean that competitor can disrupt, and a lot of users, content creator, advertisers, basically every type of users has been cited as disliking youtube but being locked in with no realistic alternative.

a) it's easy for users to switch

For google search, online stores that use google for advertisement and getting new customers can't easily switch as that would result in abandon 90% of new customer. They can't just buy their hot dog elsewhere. Online stores have to deal with google, unless their customer base is located elsewhere.

I was addressing search, not advertising or video hosting.

> if we can’t get any kind of cooperation between state members regarding taxes, then maybe it’s time to rethink the inside mechanicsm of the union ( which may include restart from scratch with fewer countries).

The problem is when things require unanimity. It's very hard to get all 28 countries to agree to something.

28 cultures is quite a lot of diversity to suddenly and forcibly slam onto a single party-line. Have you considered that maybe this collection of cultures might have values and methods that are sufficiently mutually different, that there often isn't a single policy that will satisfy all of them?

Here in the USA we have an analogous situation, but it is maintained - for at least a century and a half - with enough top-down brute force to keep the resulting tensions simmered-down such that they are only expressed via things like the "culture wars" phenomenon.

having a uniform tax code would pretty much doom the small economies to not having opportunity to grown unless it was "granted to them" as a favor by the same union government.

the ability of member states to set their own taxes is about the only protection they have handling down turns and getting new industry. their currency was given up and without the ability to print money they need other means to mitigate adverse changes to their economies. it is one reason Greece was trapped so long in their misery, bound up by EU laws and stuck with a currency they had no control over.

In the US it works by forcing states to compete on regulation and taxes which benefits everyone. because onerous taxation on one group will certainly follow with others because once that line is crossed it becomes to easy to keep doing so. Indirect taxes are a politicians best friend because you have ready bogeymen and no apparent affect on the public though in reality they are paying the end result

I'm not sure that blaming Greece problems on the EU instead of unsustainable social policies and populist and/or corrupt politicians is fair. After all, a populist with more knobs to their country's economy is still a populist and, if anything, will bury the country's economy even faster.

I agree that "uniform" wasn't the right word, I was thinking more about cooperating and managing taxes as a whole (in order to find a compromise that would benefit everybody). It doesn't mean that everybody would have the same taxes but at least there would be some level of coherency.

>In the US it works by forcing states to compete on regulation and taxes which benefits everyone.

Everyone except the environment at least, it's often the first regulation to go. This kind of competition gives an edge to rich people and big companies who can afford to relocate if they dislike the way they're taxed or regulated somewhere, meanwhile low-skilled workers and small companies can't generally move a thousand of km away on a whim.

In Europe this is even worse because we have cultural and language barriers. Even for an educated worker moving from London to Berlin to Paris to Prague is not a simple thing at all. The only ones who benefit from this infighting are large companies and rich people who can more easily relocate their income in order to get the best deal possible.

See the whole Amazon HQ2 thing for an example of that in the US, you end up with a huge company getting great benefits that no small player could ever dream of. How is that fair and how does that benefit everyone? How does tech giants moving to Ireland to pay less taxes benefit everyone? It benefits Ireland arguably, but overall the EU gets less money than we otherwise would.

I mean just for the sake of the argument we could imagine that the EU as a whole would agree to tax these tech giants a certain amount, bigger than what Ireland makes them pay now. Then we give the Irish exactly the same amount they're currently receiving and we redistribute the rest within the EU. Wouldn't we be objectively better off in this scenario?

Now of course that would be a weird arrangement but you see my point, the real winners here are Google and Facebook, not Ireland, Germany or Poland.

> Then we give the Irish exactly the same amount they're currently receiving

Please don't take this the wrong way but: There's a whole body of tax-literature and tax-philosophy that renders such a statement naive.

How do you figure e.g., how the current money Ireland makes is linked to the increase or decrease of tax-rates? How is it linked to other factors making Ireland worthwhile to invest? How much was Ireland accumulating on those other factors, because it has been a tech tax haven so long? How much future growth of these factors is taken from Ireland because of your proposed regime? And how do you deal with a decrease in overall EU tech tax income (per country) because of your proposed regime? Would you e.g. go so far as to pay Ireland its current income even if the overall EU tech tax income would be lower? Would you otherwise grow Ireland's pay with an increased overall EU tech tax income, beyond Ireland's current income, and if so what would be Ireland's fair share?

And while those questions can have multiple correct answers, those questions have to be answered in a consistent way, because rule of law. And that consistency alone is often enough a problem, because other countries have other consistencies their taxing has to apply to, again because rule of law. And those laws are usually not just paper, but codifications of hundreds of years of cultural norms and customs.

I acknowledge that my thought experiment was very simplistic and ignores many factors but my point was that I can't really imagine how we'd end up worse off negotiating as a whole union instead of competing with each other internally and trying to undercut your partners at any occasion. I mean, that's the whole principle behind unions (as in syndicate of workers for instance), as a whole you have more bargaining power, as individuals you're as weak as your weakest link (whoever is willing to concede the biggest tax breaks, cut down on environmental regulations etc...).

I mean the EU, the free market, the euro, all that doesn't have "hundreds of years of cultural norms and customs" behind it. Why couldn't we go further? The only thing that we've had consistently over hundreds (or even thousand) of years in Europe is warfare and royal inbreeding. If we could avoid having to invade Ireland or having our finance ministers wed each-other in order to settle this tax dispute I think it would be grand.

> The only thing that we've had consistently over hundreds (or even thousand) of years in Europe is warfare and royal inbreeding

While I used to say exactly that for most of my life, trust me this is a gross oversimplification. With an emphasis on gross. Law traditions date back to the Romans, Celts, Germanics and others at least. And of course no sovereign country on the onset of the EU would have accepted the new EU norms if they were to contradict with their own. That the EU nowadays tries to impose rules that contradict those norms is reason for the ever rising resentment of Brussels around Europe.

> If we could avoid having to invade Ireland

You say it yourself: How can we declare moral superiority if we are openly discussing invading Ireland because we've abandoned pillar principles like national sovereignty?

How can you lament "over hundreds (or even thousand) of years in Europe [of] warfare" while simultaneously abandon the core lesson of those wars (sovereignty)?

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