Is the Italian market even worth 1.1b mid-term? I might have a skewed estimate since Amazon is "really small" in Sweden, but that is a LOT of money considering it's 1.1B lost profits and not turnover.
1. Stop doing what it's doing now and become fair and transparent, at least in Italy
2. Move out of Italian market
3. Keep paying even increasing fines and change nothing
In all those cases consumers in Italy would profit, either from fair market or from more tax money.
EDIT: formatting the list
TBH the most realistic option is something around 3: pay fines, change nothing (maybe rais prices a bit), make noise to get consumers on its side (Italians disproportionately like Amazon, because of its no-question-asked policy on returns is an absolute rarity there), wait for a friendly government to fix things in its favour.
> 2. Move out of Italian market
this would be a net negative all around. especially for consumers.
Like Amazon would have used that money for the greater good instead.
Like the US is much better at this, throwing trillions of public money in weapons while they can't seem to afford free public healthcare.
Anyway it only makes it more absurd; that the US as a nation manages to be the first military world power using less money than they spend to have a broken healthcare system that ruins people's lives.
The US can afford free public healthcare. It could probably afford free public healthcare with its current public healthcare spending (per capita it spends far more than most developed countries providing that, and per GDP it spends a similar amount), but instead it's spends hyper inefficiently so as to maintain a private healthcare system that costs even more on top of the public system.
Weapons are irrelevant to that, though the US spends too much (and too inefficiently) on those, too.
I do believe that is good to tax/fine Amazon appropriately, I just don't believe that the Italian government will use that money for the benefits of the Italians.
The rest is just false allegations
Also this is not a tax but a fine. There's a big difference
If you're happy that they should pay taxes then I don't get the reason of your comment.
My point, however, is that we need to look at their profits, not revenue, to understand the impact of the fine.
For illustration, 5% of 5bn is 250m, so if the fine is 1.1bn, it will take them 4 years to absorb it from localized profits only. Peanuts.
They definitely are capable of playing by the rules.
The hit is not sustainable if replicated across two or three EU markets, but if limited to Italy it's just a cost of business.
Since it became available here it became the de-facto standard for online purchases, most people don't even look at other marketplaces now and are often willing to pay more just because the order is coming from Amazon (even when it's a 3rd party seller)