[masfuerte]

> contending the company lowballed the price of trademarks, customer agreements, software licenses and other rights it moved offshore

At the same time they were telling HMRC (the British tax authority) that IP rights, etc. were incredibly valuable and a significant cost of doing business (in the form of payments back to the mothership), and that's why they made very little profit in the UK and didn't need to pay much tax.

[pjc50]

Trying to trace more detail on this: https://www.taxwatchuk.org/seven-large-tech-groups-estimated...

That mentions the digital services tax; I remember some of HN being quite angry that "Europe" was trying to get a share of the immense wealth extracted from it by American multinationals.

[philipallstar]

What you mean is American multinationals were inventing things people wanted to pay for and the existing government rent seeking wasn't working.

[Muromec]

Wealth extracted from a company sounds like taxes.

[loeg]

"Wealth extracted from it" seems like a disingenuous framing of "voluntary market exchange of money for services." It's not like Europe is a colony. Tech companies only make money by providing goods and services people choose to pay for.

[heavenlyblue]

The have to share their wealth because they are allowed to operate within a stable legal framework that everybody else is paying for except them. It seems like US isn't using their own taxes efficiently enough given that CEOs dont get killed on the street in the EU but they do get killed in the US. And these corporations arent willing to pay for that, well then they should not be allowed to operate here either.

[moomin]

I see a very funny fight on our hands.

[rolandog]

Ah, the next level in determining Schrodinger's cat's outcome is if the detector measures Zuckerberg's profit taxability instead of radiation decay; the measurement's results depend on who is carrying them out, where they've taken place and, in all instances, the cat kills itself due to our inability to fix the crazy rich-favoring taxation systems.