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Comment by pochamago | Hacker News Reader

The cynical streak in me would suggest that now is a popular time to criticize major tech organs for their relationship to news, and the Australian government is hoping to use that to funnel money from US companies to Australian ones.

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You could argue that taxes were designed before the "you are the product" age. If Apple sells a phone in Australia to a local customer, they pay Australian sales tax and possibly import dues to get the phone into the country. When Facebook sells data from an Australian user to a random advertiser, all tax is due in Ireland/Netherlands or some other tax haven and Australia makes nothing.

So while this approach with news media is a strange one, I think there is an argument to be made for taxing things differently. Make Facebook/Google pay a fair tax in all countries they're active in. Then each country can decide how they want to use that, if a democratically elected government in Australia wants to subsidize news using taxes they should be able to do so.

While you're right that there's a reasonable argument, I can't say it's one I agree with. I already strongly dislike the change in US tax law that now requires all e-commerce companies to adjust their sales tax based on the location of the consumer. It added a bunch of new bureaucratic overhead for us on top of negating one of the competitive fringe benefits of having a business in a small state instead of California. And it mostly just seems arbitrary to me which way that tax swings, rather than intrinsically fair.

True, the US sales tax thing is a great case-study on how it doesn't work. Taxing revenue probably also doesn't work due to large differences in margin. If you tax 1% on the revenue of a 1.5% margin kind of business it sounds rather unfair, charging a 1% revenue tax on a business with 90% margin sounds low.

So indeed there is no clear simple implementation strategy for this yet.

Tax revenue, not profits, is a potential solution

If anything, US big tech is and has been siphoning money from the Australia news media for a decade.

How exactly is that? Giving you a link to the news media web site does extract money from them?

Link previews (headline, image, blurb) are a substitute good. Many would-be eyeballs never click through. Big tech profits, news media dwindles.

Yet the code targets all links, not previews, just links. This is a cash-grab.

News sites can opt out via robots.txt if they don't want to be in Google's listings.

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