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Company pay taxes because societies a.k.a. countries say so. Taxes are not a business dealing in kind of you give this, they give you that. Countries do not need a rationale for taxes as long as they stay consistent in their law. Basically, France could charge a tax on Alaskian fish.

The only problem is usually: why the hack the Alaskian company should pay. But for our global companies the situation is different: when they want to charge someone in France for services, then France has a way to collect :).

>Countries do not need a rationale for taxes as long as they stay consistent in their law

Legally speaking, sure.

Morally speaking, it's not so clear. Wars have been started because the rulers subscribed too heavily to your line of reasoning. Being taxed into oblivion is generally considered a damn good reason to kick out the current government, peacefully at first but violently if necessary. While I don't think Britain and France are anywhere near a breaking point with respect to taxes it's worth remembering that a breaking point exists.

Taxing Google and Facebook is not pushing British or French population closer to that breaking point.

Costs get passed on to buyers and eventually to consumers. They might get diluted along the way but they do get passed on.

... Except you then realize that in Google and Facebook's case the end user you think of is not the customer/consumer those costs will be passed on.

EDIT: downvoting me doesn't change the fact that those 2 don't make their money by charging you and me their users, they charge advertisers who want to show us ads and get our data. If a cost needs to be passed on, it will be passed on them.

Those advertisers will pass the cost onto their customers. This is consumer facing advertising we're talking about. The people the advertisers pass their cost on to are the consumers, the people buying their products and services.

Sorry, but reality does not work that way. The economy is not really some collection of autonomous agents trading spherical cows like macro-economists would like you to think. When you get two or three layers removed from a cost/benefit at this scale it has been reduced to noise. What will happen is that the ad vendors (Google, FB, etc) will pass some of the cost on to ad buyers but not all and the tech titan stockholders will take a small hit. The ad buyers will integrate the new costs into their ad models and so they will view it as a cost of advertising and pay it (small profit hit) or will consider alternative advertising options if the cost impacts advertising ROI. What will the consumers pay? Nothing.

This comment seems a bit speculative, do you have or is there information out there that supports this?

This is more anecdotal, but my time at a logistics company has shown the opposite to be true. Every cost increase, whether it was a tariff or increased fuel surcharge, was passed on to the next company, and to the next, down to the end consumer themselves. Every increase in vendor/supplier price was reflected almost immediately in the next invoice as our CFO instructed us to maintain our profit margins. There was even a multiplicative effect as each company applied their margins onto each price increase, such that a $100 increase in fuel costs could be double or triple that by the end.

It is possible that companies with massive margins might be willing to bite the bullet, but I doubt the advertising industry is full of companies with big margins. Perhaps the tech companies at the top, but definitely not the more numerous and smaller companies. For this reason, I find it extremely unlikely that "the end user will pay nothing". The end user will pay something, but the size of that "something" is certainly debatable.

No, but not only a displeased population can cause trouble to a state.

The resources these technology firms are exploiting in, e.g. Belgium, include user data and network infrastructure - the latter in particular is often very highly publicly subsidised so if a company is seen as benefitting from it disproportionately then it's unsurprising that people think they should be taxed for taking advantage of it.

> Companies pay taxes because they use resources and services provided in a given country (roads and other infrastructure, police protection, courts, etc.).

That's one view. Another is that they pay taxes simply because they have resources that society needs. If Facebook is trading in the UK (benefitting from access to the UK market, then I think it is reasonable that they pay tax in the UK).

What about David Cameron, Beckham ...

Every rich person in the UK is incorporated in British overseas territory. Shouldn't they be the first to be taxed ?

David and Victoria Beckham paid £12.7m tax in the last year. Facebook, which collected £1.3bn in UK sales, paid £15m...

I think the problem is that sometimes the seller and buyer are both from country A but the sales is registred under company X in country B. Company X is normally not Facebook, but they are trying really hard to change that.

Examples of X: MrJet and Trivago.

I think the commonly held doxa is that company should pay (some of their) taxes where they make profit.

In the case of sales this would be more clear cut. But Facebook profits from user in a country through ads, which do not necessarily need to be purchased in that country. It's just that these things antecedes the internet and the omnipresence of digital goods and services.

>* If a company located in US, like Facebook, avoids paying taxes there (strange that someone who pretends to be rather left leaning person like FB owner escapes taxes, but that's a different story) it is the US problem, not a global problem and they should sort this out somehow - for instance make FB to pay directly for services/resources provided by the state, maybe in the global economy corporate tax does not make much sense any more?*

Doesn't have to use services/resources. It can just pay a tax for the privilege of operating in the country.