[governance] FW: [Dewayne-Net] Facebook paid £2.9m tax on £840m profits

[Louis Pouzin (well)]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 5:06 PM, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com>wrote:

*1. globalization including in the transfer and sale of immaterial (virtual
or virtualized) goods and services is becoming transformative both in
volume and in substance as a result of  the Internet... National
administrative and political regimes (including in taxation) are struggling
to keep up and in many cases appear to be falling behind--hence the current
complaints largely OECD countries concerning the tax related behaviours of
companies like Google and Facebook.
*
True. The diversity of taxation paths, and the latency of fiscal
institutions make it relatively easy for big companies to take sneaky
routes through the tax labyrinth.

*2. a further effect of the Internet is to render national boundaries much
much more porous/fluid/transparent/immaterial than previously. While some
corporations (and individuals) are massively able to capitalize on this;
these appear to be restricted to only a very few countries who in turn
appear to be sufficiently well positioned and resourced to profit while
others lack sufficient resources to intervene or even have oversight over
these processes let alone ensure significant local benefits. This suggests
the need for some sort of global oversight mechanism since no single
national regime is able to effectively respond in these areas.

*True. This is another colonization cycle where some kingdoms or States
have enough power to ignore more or less agreed boundaries and exploit or
dominate their virtual neighbors.
*
3. the issue under discussion here is less whether past behaviours were
legal or not (leaving aside the ethics of not paying ones' "fair share")
but whether certain actions/interventions are either deliberately or by
happenstance directed towards a "political" intervention so as to preclude
the type of globalized "Hands On" actions that might be warranted given the
changing legal, taxation and other circumstances that the Internet is
precipitating.

*In practice, isn't a matter of opportunism ?

Louis
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