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Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

> I'd love for Google to give the EU a solid reason to encourage homegrown (and tax-paying) alternatives to big US tech

Big tech pays it's taxes in Europe, via Luxemburg and Ireland in a 100% legal way. If Europeans countries are serious about collecting tax revenues they claim should be theirs, all they have to do is simply write it in the tax code.

If Europe wants to compete, the first thing it has to do is fix it's talent retention problem. Build more and pay more.

Easy to whine about these "evil foreign tech giants", harder to tackle the real issues! Will paying coders more get bureaucrats re-elected? Will going after large corporations using the same laws as the tech giants help them getting re-elected?

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The moment your argument for paying 0.01% taxes is "it's legal", you've fallen pretty low for the quality of your arguments.

Why even have the argument when a simple well written tax code could make the issue not happen in the first place?

But he is right. Why not just fix this at a policy level?

While paying low tax seems morally wrong, the job of a company is to do good for itself, because they all are responsible to their shareholders.

Google left China on moral grounds in 2000s. Did that make other companies follow suit? No. Apple had no problem censoring or using workers in exploitative conditions to eke out more profits. Did Apple's products get boycotted because of it? No. So, even the users don't care.

So why would a company try to uphold some weird moral standard at the cost of profit when its users and shareholders both don't care?

Viewing a company as responsible only to it's shareholders is perspective only proposed and adopted in the last 50/60 years (maybe less), and I believe, a flawed one.

Historically, businesses were understood to also have responsibility to their communities and customers. Also their workers, though perhaps that began to shed somewhat less recently.

In my view, any person or entity is morally responsible for their impacts on others.

So, I believe companies should, indeed, have moral standards.

...

That said yes this is a cultural shift so by no means any kind of immediate solution, and there will always be bad actors, so yes totally agree, fix the policy!

But let's not support a business culture where being a bad actor is cool- it makes the already very difficult job of appropriate regulation that much harder.

> But let's not support a business culture where being a bad actor is cool-

Agreed but what can few individuals even do when masses don't even care? We can try to use our privacy sensitive platforms and modular phones with open OSs but that will not really change anything. If my past experience has anything to go by, all it will do is, we will get shafted by overpaying for substandard experience.

I hate to sound defeatist but unless there can be a change in mainstream consciousness about it, it is mostly a lost cause.

> Why not just fix this at a policy level?

Because the "Big evil foreign tech giants" aren't the only ones to use these clauses in the tax code. But it's fashionable to bash on them. So you keep the votes and your corporate friends.

Yeah, I really doubt European companies themselves are not using these rules to get out of paying more.

They are paying no more than what they are legally required to, just like everyone else.

Would I want to see Google pay more? Yes. Do I expect them to be charitable and suddenly start paying more than the law requires them? No, this is unreasonable. What I expect is for lawmakers to make changes to the tax code, so that those tech giants end up paying more. Until that moment happens, that's fully on those lawmakers, not on Google or anyone else.

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