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Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

The language is one factor of many used to determine if you're doing business in Germany. Otherwise you have loopholes where German language websites advertising in German, to Germans, accepting Euros, and shipping to German addresses, is somehow not considered to be "doing business" in Germany simply because their offices and servers happen to be hosted in the US.

Not completely nuts, but definitely an overreach.

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> where German language websites advertising in German, to Germans, accepting Euros, and shipping to German addresses, is somehow not considered to be "doing business" in Germany simply because their offices and servers happen to be hosted in the US

You're saying it like it's a bad thing. If US has better laws than Germany and businesses serving Germans want to choose that jurisdiction because of it, it's "competition", not a "loophole". Otherwise another "loophole" we could find is that some Germans, seeking lower taxes and high standards of living, and more beneficial laws, may just move to US altogether, thus depriving German state of much needed tax income and stopping being subjects to German laws. We wouldn't want them to plug that "loophole", do we?

You have to pay U.S. taxes on worldwide income. The U.S. is the only country that does this, though.

Not quite the only, but almost.

That is indeed a defect of US system, and one that people should account for when they make their choices. I wish US stopped doing that (especially that the tax treaties in many cases lead to the fact that US doesn't even see any money anyway, it just produces tons of paperwork for expats).

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