Considering how far behind the European Union is in the digital services industry, and considering the need to decouple from the American circus, a strategic move towards preying on digital services through tariffs or taxes is a logical option.
How about we talk openly about it- there is a limited number of perfectly good heads- and fabrication industries and service industries are in systemic competition on that limited pool. And they create their own support environment ("bloated universities") where the service wins and destroy the competition.
My child was born in NZ and in order to gain dual citizenship you need to submit form in Lithuanian.
To access e-gov you used to have so many cool methods - most popular is your bank (makes sense since they’d have highest stakes and worked out security), then your local SIM card finally your ID card. Well first ones are off the table since I was away for so long. I managed to source a usb smart card reader. Even somehow more luckily find working software. By shred of luck my card is not expired (card is valid for 10years, but digital certificates on chip for 18 months lol).
I’m in. The digital form is ok, albeit designed before mobile era so definitely won’t work in mobile screen. Fine. Submit it. Two weeks later I get a response (clearly my form was just dumped as an email) that in fact I need to meet face to face to ID me and my child…
Fortunately thru personal connections I was able to do so via video call.
Contrast that to NZ. In 10 years here I didn’t get to meet beurocrat even once. I’ve mailed a form and received passport by post. Low tech but sublime experience.
The lure of USA protection lingers in Eastern Europe - some just haven't realized the new reality yet.
Obviously Czechoslovakia has a great excuse, not having existed for 32 years, but neither Czechia nor Slovakia come close to Ireland, either is terms of Euro-value or number of software jobs.
Ireland's software exports dwarf Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and the Baltics combined. That's ignoring the inflated GDP figures from international IP revenue tax-dodging.
The days of the Double Irish are long gone and comparing effective tax rates paints a very different story, so this is 5 years out of date in as true as it ever was.
Even excluding the EU IP revenue of multinationals with EMEA HQs in Ireland, real software development revenue is over double Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and the Baltics combined.
But that's irrelevant, as ghost HQs can avail of Ireland's tax regime with minimal employees.
Ireland's extremely educated workforce and exceptionally stable and peaceful governance along with business friendly economic climate are the reason Ireland is a software powerhouse, independent of tax regime (which is not particularly conducive to large employers).
Also there are quite a few successful gaming companies in central and eastern Europe - like CD project (Witcher/Cyberpunk) in Poland and Factorio, Mafia, Kingdom Come from Czech Republic.
Also on the IT driven services are there are quite big companies like like Alza/Allegro (eq. local Amazon), Seznam (eq. local Google), Windy (weather), etc.
Also, if you look at manufacturing, Europe still provides some essential things. SAP, a German company, is a global market leader in ERP and related software. Companies like Tesla buy high their high tech machines from Germany. And the machines that make the chips that are power the AI revolution are made by ASML, headquartered in the EU. US manufacturing is a lot weaker than EU manufacturing at this point.
So, I don't think it is that black and white and there are a lot of things in the US that aren't necessarily very modern or nice.
And for taxation, there's the argument to be made that there are an awful lot of US companies with extreme valuation rivaling the GDP of most EU countries that seem to be very good at dodging taxes in the EU despite getting a lot of their revenue there. There's a lot of talk about trade imbalances lately, and this has been an obvious candidate for balancing. So, I don't think this is such a strange thing to do for the EU to be publicly musing doing something about that in light of all the tariffs that Trump is threatening with currently.
Which is of course what this is all about.
On the other hand, blanket tariffs levied on countries rather than specific industries don’t look like they serve a specific industrial policy.
I dont believe anything in my comment stated the contrary.
I pointed out this wouldn't be tariffs since it's not on physical goods, hence the comparison you made doesn't really make sense.
The technicalities of whether it's "tax" or "tariff" is irrelevant, in the context they both bring about the same desired outcome.
I skipped right past it because I understood what GP was getting at, and saw no need to get pedantic over the wording.