France Proposes an Internet Tax
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
and you wonder why....
Seriously, France makes it very hard for small business owners to exist. Either you are a tiny single-owner, or you're a big corporation, but the fixed costs to going from single owner to limited liability is pretty intense. That and all the smart people get convinced to become bankers or managers, while all the motivated (in terms of coding) people go into the abysmal university system.
The ultimate irony is that the grandes ecole system seems like the perfect storm to create some very intelligent entrepreneurs, but these students (technically incompetent but motivated and competent on a management level) are in completely different schools from the people with actual know-how , who get forced into consultancies mainly, to write Java enterprise code for the rest of their lives.
Also I don't understand why you say that the students graduating from grandes écoles are technically incompetent. I believe they've produced a ton of world class scientists and engineers: last year's Physics' Nobel prize winner, half of the last batch of Fields medallists to name a few…
If one really wanted to criticize the way these manager-engineers are educated I'd say they are too geared towards the public sector and large enterprises, but that's the aim of these schools anyway: to educate the highest ranking civil servants.
But people going to Polytechnique are going there to become businessmen, rarely (if ever) to get their hands dirty in technical stuff. Their life is pretty well set from that school.
I believe that this is a false statement regarding the domains of physics, mathematics, or general engineering, but i think the level of engineers out of grandes ecoles in comp-sci and programming is really far from stellar, being easily surpassed by students out of universities.
I actually had a few courses at Telecom Paristech : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech
The level of the exams was quite low compared to anything i had at university.
The course itself was as most of the courses i had at university, quite good technical and theoretical content, very bad pedagogy, and utterly terrible practice projects.
A quick glance at what is available at top american universities convinced me that this is a real problem in French comp-sci education. See thoses courses for an example of what i mean when i think "good practice projects":
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero
On the one hand, the pure coding and enterprise tasks are given to people from lower tier/more specialized schools, who are less expensive but mostly lack the advanced comp-sci knowledge. On the other hand, people in pure research fields don't care about your applied skills.
The examples of practice projects you listed for OS and compilers are similar to what we did. We also had a fourth year practice project that lasted all the year in a 6 students team and which was really interesting: we were working on a cross platform networked Tarot game with an expert system implemented in Prolog. It was really fun :-)
Of course, it also depends on the grande école or university you go to and I'm quite sure that for example MIT is much better than RIT for example.
Or by their peers in Physics, Mathematics and GE. I know it's just anecdotal, but the French high tech companies I know in some level of details were mostly founded by non comp-sci majors (I'm thinking of Criteo, Vision Objects, Dassault Systèmes…).
Basically people getting out of these schools are very smart and know a bit about very many domains. It's just that, for having spent 5 years in the school system, they'll know a lot less about their domain than others having spent 5 years in an american university (for example).
In 99% of cases this is not important. You learn everything on the job anyways, and people going through the grande ecole system makes you very good at learning quickly and effectively. It's just that while in school you might be a bit useless, and when you get into the workforce, you'll end up with a pretty cushy job anyways.
There is a large movement of entrepreneurs in the US that are encouraging bright students to drop out of college, because they think that college has become completely ineffective in teaching useful work skills. Maybe it's because of overspecialization.
I don't want to defend the French system, which I sincerely despise for political reasons (this two tiered system is an important cause of social injustice in France), but the American academic system doesn't seem to compare favorably with it, especially in comp-sci curricula.
Anyway, back to the subject. The idea behind all this is the following: there are a number of activities, for instance the press, which suffers from the internet. People read the news online and don't subscribe to paper press anymore. They also don't want to pay to much for reading the online press. To get good articles in the papers, you need to pay professional journalists. So the conclusion is that the press industry needs to find a new business model.
As it happens, there are companies making fortunes on internet, and their business largely depends on the contents that is created by others. This is particularly true with Google and the press industry. If you see it that way, it seems only fair that Google participate in paying the journalists producing quality content that makes people use their search engine and/or see their ads.
Now the question is, how to achieve this? Let the situation evolves and see what happens? This would lead to the decline in quality of the article in the press and eventually to entire journals disappearing, except for some of them for which some private groups have invested in. This is not something that we want because private interest and information don't mix well together. It is the case that many journals are in (sometimes big) part financed on public fund, so the other solution is to augment those public funding, and have the government take care of collecting the money. This is done using taxes.
I hope this makes the intention clearer to those of you who don't live in France.
No, the real issue is that they don't know what to do, or are afraid to take risks and do the right thing so they try to take the money where it is. And I'm not being hypocritical, I sincerely do not see why it would be fair for google to pay the newspaper: seems to me like it's a win-win, where google gets ad-money, and the newspapers get traffic. Now if the newspapers are not capable of transforming traffic into money, that's another issue, and google isn't responsible for that..
Well i obviously know some, i've done two master degrees in French university, one in Computer Science and one in Sociology, and i've found the GP's post to be pretty accurate.
So please feel free to post a real rebuttal, i'm ready to argument at least as to why i think french university education prepares very badly to anything practical and creative that isn't in the domain of pure academia.
This for example :
> are in completely different schools from the people with actual know-how , who get forced into consultancies mainly, to write Java enterprise code for the rest of their lives.
is actually pretty much 95% true. When you get out with a french comp-sci degree, you are presented with the following choices (by your professors and the businesses linked to the university) :
- Either go into research
- Either go into very specialized industrial work (high safety embedded systems, mission critical components)
- Either go into big consultancies doing Java (Cap Gemini and such)
This does not arise from maliciousness, but only from the fact that those are the three main areas in which there is work for comp-sci students in France. The area of consumer oriented innovative enterprises, be them big or small, is pretty much nonexistent.
The courses in my university (which is supposedly the second best french university for computer science) are quite difficult, some of them are even good (most notably in the domain of logic/semantics, programming language research and the likes), but most of them are either:
- Highly theoretical, based on subsets of domains that have seen no massive practical use in decades, still being taught because they are the teacher's PHD subject. - Supposedly practical, but using outdated/horrible/both technologies.
For example, i have had two introductions to web development at University, one using bash scripts and C (no kidding), by some sort of mad teacher who thought reimplementing libC with more ternaries was the way to go about life, the other using such things as JSP/Spring Framework, obviously designed to target those students who were gonna go in the "Enterprise world". Both made me want to kill myself (figuratively).
On a variety of more "academic" subjects where we are actually supposed to have some experts here in France, be it systems programming, embedded systems, highly parallel programming , the quality of the courses when compared to those of top american universities (which are as of now widely available for free on the interwebs) is so low that it is really, truely depressing.
This is obviously a complex problem, and there are no black and white, but if you are really able to argue that there is no truth to the statement of the GP, then you are the one who doesn't know a lot about french university, or being hypocritical.
Are you really trying to claim that Google largely depends on the content created by the press for their success?
If so, wouldn't you also claim that projects which become famous solely because of link aggregators such as Reddit and HN should pay a monetary amount back to the link aggregator?
Also, how do you account for the free services provided to the press industry to allow their content to be written? Does the press in France still pay sums to the Gutenberg estate and heirs?
Either way even assuming your point is true, the response should be much simpler: If the journalist content is really that valuable to Google then have the publisher negotiate with Google directly for payment, or remove their content from Google and make them suffer.
France: socialist. Check!
The online advertisement business is just another disruption on the "tax industry". Taxes on a global market are a doomed business. Bring these corporate practices effectively into the public eye and negotiate from there. Foster competitiveness. But don't push yet another distorting set of laws onto an already high pile of bureaucracy.
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57544873-37/apples-taxes-o...
[2] http://www.ifoapplestore.com/2012/05/23/spain-retail-financi...
But making legal hurdles against moving profits this way is not something I am against, I find it more fair if profits are taxed where they are made rather than one country making all tax profits on the expense of others.
But the legal construction should be simple, make sense, and be effective. Not so easy to achieve.
Second, this idea is just an idea, not a law project or proposition. There have been reports as official as this one inciting free downloading and instead, we got hadopi law...
Third, I find this idea quite interesting (at least new). It is quite different from other internet taxes (Germany's google tax for example) in that it gives a reason for taxation other than the worsening of old businesses. The real idea being that the exchange of personal information for internet services is a trade that needs not be untaxed, as barter can be taxed.
However, there is indeed an ongoing war between Google and the major ISP over bandwidth costs.
"Free" one of the major ISP says that Google should pay a bit more for the massive bandwidth taken by YouTube. Last week or so, they made a silent remote update to all their router with an automatic filtering out of all Google ads. That time it's the government that thought it was a bit too much. War I tell you.
Your post is missing the critical two words net neutrality (which is what we want) and douple dipping (which is what ISPs want).
Since their economy is based on the Euro, they can't print their way out of debt like we do here in the USA. Thus, they need to find alternate ways to generate revenue.
Would there be anything Google could do to counter this?
They could replace GMail, Google Apps for domain and Youtube for all their non-paying users with a page explaining that they cannot continue to operate in France seen how unreasonable the requests from the french government are getting.
But don't forget there's the EU and France is part of the EU and all it takes is one EU directive to put Hollande back on reasonable tracks. There are already a lot of other domains where the french government would like to open its big mouth but has to shut up thanks to Europe being in power.
Also, I'd be surprised to learn that Google is actually collecting money in France as opposed to Ireland based on the way I've seen almost every other software company structured. So I'd suspect that the revenues in France are essentially 0.
This is not an Internet Tax...
So it's really: "France proposes yet another Internet tax (and shall still be unable to reach budget equilibrium because of the ineffiency of its army of overpaid state-workers providing really-not-much to its citizens)".
France needs revenue it's true (and also cut spending big time), but needs to create good jobs first, and make it less risky(and painfull) for a startup to hire people.
Population is getting older , and rightfully we need to take care of old people , who is going to pay for all that welfare stuff ?, not businesses , they are leaving France and are right to do so
Do like me: I moved to Brussels. And I'll move further away if they try to take more liberties away from me.
I hate socialists and communists and I'll go as far as needed as to not see them in power (Belgium is a bit special in that there are always coalitions of six, seven, eight political parties ruling the country... Including both liberals and socialists. So Belgium is safe for now).
Come here, it's a good place to be.
Now they come up with a "personal data" tax scheme targeted at Google: is it just the case that people who really hate Google were voted into power?
It really seems that way. I mean how else can you explain that all of their ideas are so stupid.
As a general rule, if you're trying to scheme up some way to "get" Google, stop. Think first. The first question you should ask is: What will this do to companies that compete with Google? Will it bankrupt them? Give Google an advantage over them, because its large legal staff can better navigate the law, or take advantage of economies of scale? Because if it does, and your aim is to hurt Google, you've failed. All it does is strengthen their market position and increase their likelihood and ability to diverge from their "don't be evil" roots and embrace the dark side.
I mean just think about this tax for two seconds: Never mind the complete inability to administer it (how do you collect the tax from a company with zero business presence in France whose site is still visited by French users? Or do they get a pass, causing websites to flee the country en masse?), what does this do to the incentives of the legislature? Now their tax revenue is based on companies collecting personal information from users. Anything that would stop or even slow that down is now a significant "cost" to the legislature because it reduces the revenue the tax generates, so I hope none of you ever wanted to see any internet privacy regulation again.
It really seems like these people don't even think for one second before they open their mouths.
I don't think they hate it. They are just incompetent and desperate for reducing deficit. They see that Google has a lot of money and scheme to take some it.