United Kingdom: The Anomaly In Google's Revenue | Hacker News Reader

United Kingdom: The Anomaly In Google's Revenue

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2 pointsnpguy6 comments

Maybe brits are just more lazy than people from other countries and just click on ads to find what they want.

Or maybe british advertisers are crazy and pay insane prices for adwords.

Or maybe a mix of both. Who knows, but frankly, the brits are getting raped by Google through the hemorrhaging of $1bn per quarter taken out of the domestic economy. It is obscene for a company, any company, to reap the benefits of a developed economy and not pay any taxation to support the education, welfare and security of the economy they profit from.

Probably not that surprising given that Ireland is a tax haven for most large U.S. corps' presence in all of Europe. If I sign up for AdWords or AdSense now, I'm dealing with Google Ltd, even though I am not in the U.K.

Right. It looks like the revenue number is basically an accounting thing. Actual dollars from UK might be different.

I'm not sure I understand that point correctly. The Republic of Ireland isn't part of the United Kingdom.

Yes, but when people refer to the U.K. as a region, they usually mean the U.K. (i.e. including Northern Ireland) and the Republic of Ireland. Ireland is seldom its own region.

There is no mention of the Republic of Ireland in their earnings report, yet their European headquarters are in Dublin. "U.K." in the report means the U.K. and Ireland.

Really? Where have you seen this? And what evidence do you have that Google's report isn't including Ireland in its "Rest of World" figures?

To include an entire country under the heading of another neighbouring country without making that explicit is a mistake, not an assumption, doubly so when Google have quite large (and distinct) corporate presences in both Ireland and the UK. It wouldn't be too far from Starbucks listing all Canadian and Mexican profits under "United States" when there's a perfectly normal term to describe the geographic region ("North America"), just as there is with the British Isles.

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