Google Ordered Back To UK Parliament To "Explain Itself" Following Investigation

DavidGilbert99 writes "Last November Matt Brittin, Google's European chief gave a pretty convincing account of himself as he tried to explain why Google wasn't paying more tax in the UK. All the sales staff were based in Ireland apparently and the UK-based staff were there just to promote the platform for advertisers. Great. Nothing to see here. Move on please. Well, actually there is a little more to the story, as an investigation by Reuters has discovered. There are many sales staff in the UK with titles and responsibilities curiously close to what most people would call sales staff and as a result Mr. Brittin will once again have to face Margaret Hodge and the PAC to explain just what is happening."

Comments

Re:It usually works like this

[philip.paradis]

The universally sad thing about Libertarians is that they don't undertand that power always fills a vacuum: the less powerful you make democratic government, the more powerful you make privately owned businesses.

That's the point. Nothing is misunderstood, aside from your misunderstanding of economics. You probably also suffer from an unfortunate tendency to view markets with blinders and therefore see large players dominating various fields at any given snapshot in time as a bad thing, but without the ability to see that such domination is still better than the alternative of unskilled bureaucratic control that is necessarily comprised of similarly flawed human beings with no real accountability to speak of in the same examined period, with those two options being an exclusive OR proposition, and without understanding that disruptive forces periodically come along in said markets to upset the entire deal in a constructive manner.

In other words, you probably aren't somebody who effects large scale change in the first place, and happily you're not somebody who will wind up having any real influence on things in any event. You probably think you speak for the masses in some respect, but the truth of the matter is the masses don't even know what they truly believe beyond their own personal lives. This has always been true, and will always be true as long as economic scarcity exists. You might as well stop wasting your time concerning yourself with such things and just live your life.

TLDR: This is how the human species operates. Get used to it and relax.