You can prosecute someone for maliciously exploiting your computing system, even though technically "they're just using the rules you wrote", because there will never not be such rules that allow for exploitation.
The way a general anti-avoidance rule works is it says you can't do things that are just to avoid paying tax.
The tricky part, obviously, is figuring out how a jury can decide if it was really just to avoid paying tax.
The UK's approach is a Double Reasonableness test. The jurors are asked to consider not merely what they, personally might think would be reasonable, but anything any conceivable reasonable person might think is reasonable. So maybe you can't personally imagine why anybody would want multiple sports cars, but you can imagine somebody else who might think it's reasonable to buy them, so the person who avoided tax by purchasing sixty sports cars passes the Double Reasonableness test.
On the other hand, you may be unable to conceive of any person who could think that it was reasonable to open over 4000 bank accounts and then deposit £99999 into each account, if not for the fact that it avoided a tax on larger deposits and so that fails the Double Reasonableness test.
[These examples are hypotheticals, feel free to go dig up actual schemes which have passed or failed the test]
This provides appropriate latitude. And even if your strategy fails the Double Reasonableness test, you don't go to jail or anything, you just don't avoid taxes, you owe taxes exactly as if your behaviour didn't result in a favourable tax outcome. Which, if you really didn't do it just to avoid taxes as you've claimed, should surely be fine...
The other trick which was introduced at the same time imposes a duty on tax avoidance lawyers. If you help people plan to avoid taxes, that's cool but you have to explain how your scheme works to the taxman. You likely charge for your help, that's legal, and you keep that money even if the scheme doesn't actually work (that's legal and it's just smart business) but your duty ensures that the taxman already knows about the scheme before it's used, and can decide if they want government to legislate to close it next year, if they want to go to court to claim it doesn't work (because of GAAR), or if they just let it carry on.
About this law, what it really creates is an insane amount of insecurity. When other people get to decide whether what you do is reasonable or not, the only question that matters is who gets to make the decision.
And you should not have to waste precious time explanting anything to a bureocrat. Maybe Faang companies get to have that luxury
Why is HN always full of people advocating that companies should be above the law?
You harm someone in self-defence and a judge of jury decides whether what you did was reasonable. We just have a stack of case law that says 'in the past, X was found reasonable".
On the other hand, when Boeing killed hundreds of people, no one was even charged. If any individual commits the acts corporates do regularly, they'd be in jail in no time.
I've seen folks claim that HN has a significant population of investors and founders. There's probably a fair share of people who aspire to belong to that group, too. It's probably a concentration of the greater pattern of Americans seeing themselves as temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
May be I am not reading it correctly. It is perfectly legal and within the law so no one is advocating they are above the law.
On an added note, in these times of looming climate crisis, a carbon tax or something associated with companies using/polluting "free" resources (air/water/petroleum products) seems like a good idea
I really think if you need complicated (and entirely subjective!) thought experiments like this to apply the law, your law is far too complex and unfair and should probably be scrapped.
The law is hardly perfect as it is. Will never be. Just because there are more holes. It's not the reason to not close the most obvious/impactful one.