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Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, it is the lack of this tax that was preventing France from having their next Amazon. I am willing to bet significant amounts of money that even in 10 years France will have nothing even of remote resemblance of what Amazon was back in 2010, not even going to set the bar at what Amazon is today.

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They are talking about physical shops. Which are also competitors of Amazon. And where does your assessment comes from? Just guess?

>They are talking about physical shops. Which are also competitors of Amazon.

Isn't that exactly what VAT tax is for?

>And where does your assessment comes from? Just guess?

An educated guess that I am strongly confident in, to the point of willing to bet most of my savings on it. And I am not the kind of person who would usually bet any money on anything at all. My most risky money bet so far is putting a portion of my paycheck in 401k.

VAT is a tax on consumption, corporate taxes are on profits (revenues in this case). If Amazon does not have to pay as high corporate taxes due to transfer pricing, then it can offer a lower net (pre-VAT) price so their products end up being cheaper to consumers driving away sales from other retailers. While competition, you may say it is 'unfair' competition.

And yes, this makes it very hard for new businesses to enter the market as they do not have the resources necessary to do tax optimization.

There is a "French Amazon" : cdiscount. They pay there tax in France. Amazon does not. How is it fair to them ?

I hope you're right. What Amazon is today is a grossly dysfunctional "marketplace", and I hope to see the end of it.

If tax was the burden from a French "Amazon" from founding, they also could easily have a shell in Ireland or Luxembourg. I don't see this at all as France trying to tax Amazon, et all from doing business in France. I see it as a pure money grab. Truly, this isn't really a tax, but more of a tariff. It should be called as such. Maybe it's equally applied against domestic companies and wouldn't be strictly a tariff, but it's intent is most certainly as a tariff.

Edit: I don't work for Amazon, though my brother does. I also don't work at a company that has much of a stake in this fight.

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