YouTube asked to pay taxes in Turkey despite being banned | Hacker News Reader

YouTube asked to pay taxes in Turkey despite being banned

newstilt.com

22 pointsamandahyde12 comments

In my opinion, this is an opportunistic money grab by the Turkish government (legitimate or not, I can't say). Turkey has historically had a serious problem collecting taxes and has been trying to clamp down recently. This is based on my own anecdotal evidence as a first-generation Turk living in the US - I wish I could provide statistics, but a quick search did not bring anything up for me.

There is a large 'informal' economy consisting of shopkeepers, street vendors and other small businesses that are not registered and avoid paying taxes completely. In the last few years, Turkey has been trying to cut down on this by requiring all businesses (including street vendors) to produce a receipt that shows they charged tax. They regularly send 'undercover' government officials to make purchases from these vendors to test if the business offers a receipt and give heavy fines if they do not.

One time, after I tried to purchase a bottle of water and declined a receipt, the shopkeeper grabbed my arm, shoved the receipt into my palm, and demanded I take it. After that, I got into a conversation with him about taxes (he said less than 10% of citizens pay, although that seems low) and, when I described the IRS and how it was a crime in the US not to pay taxes, he was shocked and wished Turkey had a similar system. He laughed out loud when I said you could go to jail for not paying taxes.

This has nothing to do with taxes and everything to do with power games. The telecommunications board has been flexing their ban-muscle all over the place in anything that might be objectionable. The moronic part is that the ban is carried out instantly, and then the owner can contest the ban afterward.

Ah, Turkey. The country that gets really, really mad at you if you do nasty things like insult their founder, or point out unpleasant historical facts such as the Armenian genocide.

I wonder how many generations it will take before they loosen up and learn to take justified criticism?

Is it just me, or does the phrase a Western style democracy (used in the article) seem just a little ironic given the context?

Not to defend Turkey here but other Western style democracies can be just as boneheaded when dealing with technology. For a long time France was notorious about restrictions on the use of cryptography.

It is a natural tendency of governments to try to control the flow of information, the commercial landscape for ISPs in Turkey probably contributes to the current predicament more than the political climate.

Australia is a "western style democracy" currently rushing headlong into building its own great internet firewall.

There's currently a pretty good chance Rudd will be out at the next election. Somebody needs to shanghai Tony Abbott into committing his party to abolishing the great firewall if it wins.

update: Looks like Abbott is maintaining strategic ambiguity on the issue as recently as yesterday: http://www.zdnet.com.au/abbott-drawn-into-filter-debate-3393...

"I just don't know enough about it at this stage to have an opinion on that," he said, which decodes as "I don't know whether it's an election-winning or election-losing issue for me yet". People need to start agitating now to convince him.

At least two actual western style democracies do something similar.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/new-yorks-am...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124603593605261787.html

There are some points I need to make clearer.

Afaik Turkish government didn't make anything to block google services. But google carried some of its services to already banned IP block. That's why we have been having difficulties to access some services.

Secondly, it is google that is asked to pay taxes, not youtube. Government wants google to be a taxpayer and pay tax for its ad revenue.

> Secondly, it is google that is asked to pay taxes, not youtube.

No, the linked Turkish article says that they informed Google Turkey about the taxes Youtube owes since Google is the parent company. And I don't think you can tax the parent company if the subsidiary fails to pay taxes.

If you want to find out why they're being asked to pay taxes, don't bother reading the article. It doesn't say.

According to the article linked in the first paragraph (in Turkish) they are required to pay taxes for the ads of Turkish companies YouTube shows to its Turkish visitors.

EDIT: It is stated in the original article as well:

> As a consequence of YouTube’s popularity despite the ban, the video portal has been attracting advertisement from Turkish companies, a development that triggered the tax probe that Transportation Minister Yildirim was referring to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com