How about admitting that the U.S. tech giants unfairly use their monopolistic powers because the Internet has become a winner-takes-it-all economy.
Monopolization just happens to be the natural state of any system that has network effects and where all costs are front-loaded (I. e. write the code once, scale to billions of users at, if you squint, zero marginal costs).
But neither of these issues are the motivation for calls for a “digital tax”. Nor is economic nationalism. There have always been industries that were dominated by one or just a few countries: the US has media/entertainment, consumer goods manufacturing has almost entirely moved to Asia, etc.
What’s different about “digital” is that requires essentially zero presence or taxable activity at the consumers’ location. Nobody felt the need to tax Hollywood’s movies because a ticket to ‘Titanic’ in Austria may have meant 2€ leaving the country, but the bulk of it actually stayed in the local economy, as (taxed) revenue of the theatre, local distributors, corn growers, and breweries.
For physical products, this is even more obvious. French champagne served in a Billings, Montana restaurant is about 50% margin for the venue, 30% for the US-based distribution chain, and only 20% goes to funny mustaches people in striped shirts.
But it is fair to say: this is not only about taxes. This is also about countries gain control over global economy.
There's so many things I have to pay 20-30% more for in Canada (for ex: $150 for shoes that are $100 in the US) for ridiculous protective import policies for old non-core industries that do little to help the economy.
It's like the French vineyard sold all their wine at cost to an Irish holding firm, which then sold it at a markup around the world and booked all the profits. Except the vineyard also owns the holding company.
Neither the Montana buyer nor the French manufacturer are in Ireland, but that's where the money winds up and taxes paid.
The "competition" is pretty nominal at this point. The areas of competitive overlap are much smaller than the areas of monopolistic market dominance.
None of these companies are taking it all.
Please give some examples.
(except perhaps Russia)
The EU doesn't disagree with me. Some people involved may be asking questions, but that doesn't mean that the EU disagrees with me.
If the EU disagreed with me we'd know, as they'd be taking action against these companies.
Amazon has 50% of all e-commerce spend in the US.
Netflix put Blockbuster and every other movie rental store out of business. It currently has 50% of all video streaming traffic in the US.
Google has 80% of the search market.
I'm not so sure about what Apple monopolizes, but they do have a duopoly in the app store space with Google.
Wrong way to think about this. If you talk about advertising monopoly, sure. But you'd be hard-pressed to make an argument on a monopoly of free products.
> Netflix put Blockbuster and every other movie rental store out of business.
That's because Blockbuster was, quite frankly, shit. They failed to adapt to the internet. So what? Times move on. Netflix is far far better for consumers.
Something isn't a monopoly just because it's popular.
If you're a state missing out on tax because the options that provide it to you are unpopular it sure is.
This isn't a discussion about consumers.
So 50% == all?
If instead of making it more difficult to build technology products, Europe focused on making it easier maybe the would be able to provide some much needed competition to the US tech scene. They seem more determined to tear down value than create it though. In the end, it will be their own citizens suffering though lack of tech jobs available in their market (c.f. the going rate for a full time engineer in the US vs Europe), lack of innovative tech that caters to local needs and ultimately lack of tax revenue from local companies.
Funny enough, that's the two strategies that US companies/gov complain the Chinese are doing.
That said, there are a few big European players, such as on mobile games (king digital), network infrastructure (Nokia), etc. Just not as significant name brand value in the anglophone world.