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It's basically a tariff.

There is no European tech company that's going to compete with Google. They could ban Google entirely and the result would be Baidu etc. coming in and doing the exact same things.

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Not to say we have any real contenders, but it’s difficult to compete with Google when the French company pays 33% corporate tax while Google pays significantly less

To the best of my knowledge the corporate tax in question is a tax on income, rather than revenue.

Any would-be competitor to Google is going to want to plow most/all of their revenue back into growth for years, perhaps over a decade. VC funded companies normally lose money so they can grow faster.

Once you're making money, yeah that's kind of a big sucking hole you want to deal with. But that's a political issue that other EU members states have with Ireland (and Luxembourg, and the Netherlands).

Why? America has historically had very high corporate tax rates relative to the rest of the world, that's what trump's tax reforms fixed. This idea in Europe that Google lives in a low tax environment is really very wrong. Their effective rate had historically been somewhere in the upper 20 percent ranges, no?

Certainly, tax is not the reason there are no Google competitors from France.

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