Slashdot Mirror
France Considers 'Pirate Tax' For Online Ads
angry tapir writes "A report commissioned by the French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, urges the introduction of a tax on online advertising such as that carried by Google, which would be used to pay the creators of artistic and other works that lose out to online piracy."
Well, that's good, but lets address the original problem - roads have been used for smuggling for many years so lets tax billboard advertisers for the losses incurred by overland smuggling. Petition your local lawmaker NOW!
I run an ad company that might be minuscule compared to google/yahoo, but does serve text ads worldwide, with web front-ends in America and UK.
Our office, back-end and banking are in Asia. Why would I give France the time of day?
When he's not stirring up racism to try to up their votes, he's busy gazing admiringly at China. But he's not alone. Bush's best friend, Bono (of soup-elevator music boy's band "U2" fame) has the same idea. "Great" minds "think" alike.
What you don't know is that the fucktard also wants to tax inkjet cartridges(*), because he heard books are being pirated, and he obviously thinks people print ebooks. After all, that's how he reads 'em fancy newfangled electronic males.
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(*) I'm not kidding.
There is no connection, of course. In France we *love* to tax unrelated business one for each other. Last year, to compensate the lifting of advertising on public TV channels, the french government decided to tax the telcos and the ISPs. Why ? Because they're making money, so why not ? The tax has not to make any sense, it has to tax successful businesses that make money. Oh, plus Google is evil and want to scan our beautiful books — you see, another reason !
You're not concerned.
Contrary to what the summary said, it's not a tax for artist.
The problem is twofold :
- Google France declares to the french IRS 40 000 000 of revenues, while 800 000 000 coming from french companies are declared in Ireland to evade french taxes. Basically, if french money is good enough for Google to open some offices in France, they should pay taxes.
- Content providers (the like of Slashdot lemonde.fr whatever) have seen their ad revenue decrease. There is doubts on whether it comes from Google abusing it's more thant 65% market share on internet ad network.
Some info in french :
http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2010/01/08/nicolas-sarkozy-souhaite-que-google-paye-plus-d-impots-en-france_1289051_651865.html#ens_id=1280818
(Though, they're wrong on the practice being legal, it's just really hard to prove and estimate for the state)