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Comment by zonkerdonker | Hacker News Reader

The one example listed in the article was starlink. What other "Big Tech" could even be realistically dinged by this?

How do you tariff Adsense from google? Or 3rd party cell phones that run Android? Will they slap an upcharge on netflix or Amazon prime somehow?

How does suspending intellectual property rights work, also? That seems like a whole can of worms

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One obvious option would be to add a couple of percent on each transaction in the EU (e.g. each time Apple and Google take their 30% the EU takes 5% or so), that way the requirement to open up the mobile platforms to alternative app stores would also finally make sense, since European app stores wouldn't be affected by the tarrifs.

Sure, that makes sense, make the tax big enough to really hurt if they try to eat it.

I guess if IP is off the table as well, nothing to stop someone from pirating every movie on netflix and launching a clone for EU!

Im curious for some more details around this. I hope it turns out to be a nice big stick to smack some sense into the US tech oligarchs, and also their orange subordinate

ban starlink, twitter and tesla. put a %26 tax on all advertisement on Meta and Google. Put a similar tax on all Amazon Prime and Netflix subscriptions.

That should do the trick.

> How do you tariff Adsense from google

Well, it's already subject to VAT, so I guess in much the same way as that?

VAT means taxes the EU consumers prices, not on Google's profits.

True, but it's collected by Google and passed to the relevant government. So it would be similar (they just wouldn't add it to the price, as VAT is).

> it's collected by Google

Not the case in at least some EU countries. Businesses are responsible for calculating the VAT and paying it themselves.

From a quick search I cannot find any examples of tariffs applied as a tax on a specific company's profits.

They are commonly applied as a surcharge (charge on top of the business or consumer price of a good) on specific goods, which is exactly how VAT works across the EU.

Tariffs can be applied in other ways too, such as a surtax (tax on top of another tax). But I don't think tax on profits is common, as that would give the foreign company too much leeway to fudge the numbers.

I guess it just seems a bit pointless to attempt to tariff what is essentialy a monopoly. Google could pretty easily just pass on 100% of the costs of the tarrifs onto the consumer.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if more American big corpos paid more taxes, I was just curious what this plan would even look like when/if it's enacted

Passing the cost onto the consumer is what makes the business look less appealing compared to local alternatives, helping to break the monopoly.

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