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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, they are creating a largest uniform digital goods landscape in the world with wealthiest customers. It they are successful we are bound to see quite a few new spotifys.

UPD: And VAT is smaller than e.g. 30% iTunes cut, which they can now regulate with a wave of hand.

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Just adding more taxes does nothing to create a more uniform landscape.

For the Europeans, consider that Amazon & other US web companies got to charge 0% sales tax for almost their entire customer-base in the US, until they were far beyond the startup stage. For many of their US customers, they still get to charge 0%. That's what promoting small businesses looks like.

VAT adds tons of problems, especially for service or purely digital products. It's very regressive against smaller companies vs larger companies. Best thing that EU could do for small businesses is copy the US sales tax model and get rid of the VAT.

As the article says, this is about worshiping huge, old, post-IPO companies like "Google" and "Facebook", not small startups.

They're not "just adding taxes"; they enforce existing ones and also create a more uniform landscape.

It's not so important to me whether they worship small or big companies, I prefer medium sized ones anyway :)

No, the existing laws do not always force you to pay VAT for customers in other countries in the EU. This, according to the article, would. It's adding additional taxation.

> I prefer medium sized ones anyway

Infuriating, short sighted, but typical line of thinking.

How do you get to become a medium and then large company? You are a small one first. American companies can grow in a place with very few restrictions and obstructions on them while they're young and then expand into europe when they are sufficiently big. All these changes are doing is making it easier for them to do this, they'll have an inherent advantage because they don't have to deal with crap like VAT.

There are between 7,500 and 15,000 different sales tax jurisdictions in the United States, based variously on overlapping municipalities, school districts, metropolitan transit areas, etc. If one stipulates the necessity of paying out-of-state sales tax, the complexity of the situation makes it next to impossible to comply. Neighboring houses in the same city may have different sales tax rates. There are firms that specialize in just this, but even those can't achieve 100% accuracy.

VAT is on top of the iTunes cut, which they aren't going to regulate (and I don't believe they have the power to regulate sales commissions in that way either)

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