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Comment by raphaelj | Hacker News Reader

What would be the alternative to the current taxation scheme of digital goods?

Could we imagine the tax rate being weighted by the revenue made in a specific fiscal area? Lets say that if FB makes 40% of its revenue in the US where the corporate tax rate is 27%, the IRS could tax FB profits at a 11% rate (27% x 40%).

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You still have the issue of who collects.

The UN or (better, maybe) WTO should broker an international framework for digital tax enforcement.

Okay, but if I'm producing widgets, every widget I produce is transported over roads and uses public resources. So you can make the argument that because each transaction uses those, a sales tax is justifiable. On the other hand, if I'm serving web pages, the marginal cost in public resources of each new page is zero. Is there any reason for taxing those other than "wanting a piece" of that?

Is serving pages what FB does?

Basically, yeah. It's just a web app. Unless that was supposed to be taken as Socratic and you think it does something more?

I guess it was somewhat socratic. Monetary value is being extracted from UK users. Presumably that value would have not existed without physical,legal, political etc. infrastructure maintained by the state.

Taxation also pays for educating your workers, providing the electricity you need to run servers, the roads carrying your broadband infrastructure, or the salaries and general welfare of large numbers of your customers.

If you sell to / produce in a country, no matter how light your presence is, you still have a duty to pay something towards the general upkeep of such country.

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