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Comment by tedeh | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how this is going to affect small businesses selling digital services to different countries within the EU while only having one office/country of incorporation.

"The first pillar is dividing up the rights to tax a company where its goods or services are sold even if it does not have a physical presence in that country."

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I guess the same way as VAT: below a threshold (35k or 100k EUR of distance sales/year, set by the destination country), the seller's country VAT applies.

https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/individuals/buying-goo...

> to different countries within the EU while only having one office/country of incorporation

I think this system already applies to paying VAT for digital purchases in the EU.

That’s an unehlpful principle, imho. It might be more practical to “tax up”, which is the traditional approach we have followed throughout the ages. We could build a g20 organism that accumulates revenue from all global companies and redistributes it on projects that make a difference on an equivalent scale, in things like energy, transportation, health, environment preservation, space exploration and so on. Obviously there would be issues of governance to sort out, as it’s always the case, but we’d be inching forward towards global cooperation on “humanity scale” - something that we will need, eventually, if we really want global peace under democratic rule.

Even the EU does not have the power to tax. It’s practically impossible that a rather informal forum like the G20 would be granted such authority.

The EU can’t tax directly... yet. It’s inching closer, though, with each subsequent “sovereign crisis” and the looming inevitability of easier mechanisms for fiscal transfers.

I agree that it’s unlikely the g20 could or would do this tomorrow; I just think it’s what we should eventually aim for, and establishing principles against this so early-on is, imho, a mistake. But I guess I shouldn’t complain about what is, overall, positive news.

I would assume there would be a threshold of some kind

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