[klon]

The benefit and one reason for this new regulation is to enable digital download businesses to be able to compete wherever they are located within the EU. I used to run a digital download service for record companies and we had a serious disadvantage against Luxemburg registered companies like Apple since we had to add 25% VAT and they only had to add 15%.

[blfr]

I'm pretty sure that for smaller companies the overhead and added complexity erases any benefit of a more competitive price. Just look how many people are considering not selling to customers in other member states.

Which is btw the exact opposite of what EU was supposed to promote. Doing business within EU should be simpler so that we could compete against companies operating in the unified American market.

[PythonicAlpha]

That is right. At least, they should have promoted the minimum amount to be taxable (I don't know the right English word) to the new system. In the old system, smaller businesses which did less than amount x business could be excluded from the taxation. They should at least have a small amount left for real small businesses that have few foreign customers .... So, a business owner must decide, if he takes the hassle for one or two customers or just says that he takes no foreigners at all!

They could have said, that business with less than X "foreign" income could still comply to their own countries taxation ... but no, with such a thing, they just created more bureaucracy and support the big players like Amazon, against which the regulation should have gone in the first place ... (at least, that was the explanation).