Canada will start applying a proposed tax on the world’s biggest technology companies this year, despite threats from American lawmakers to carry out trade reprisals against a levy that will primarily hit U.S. firms.
The tax would be a three per cent levy on the digital services revenue a company makes from Canadian users above $20 million in a calendar year. It would apply only to companies with annual worldwide revenue of more than about $1.1 billion. Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. are among those set to be impacted.
The government points out in the budget that at least seven other countries, including the U.K., France, Italy and Spain, already have similar taxes in place.
Algorithmic advertising big tech companies (Meta, Google, Amazon, etc) generate profit at the expense of society. They blindly follow short term algorithms with no regard for their impact on society. We obviously should tax them but we should also make sure our laws enable us to prosecute people who profit by destroying society. Hold them accountable
It’s about oligopoly that inserted itself at the core of the society (where town squares, pubs, inns and paper media would be in “good old times”), openly abuses it and claims it’s normal. They are basically monetizing lies and distortion.
They are also very centralized and thus anti-democratic.
Taxing is not enough. I’d say making commercial social media should be illegal as a thing. Get back to newsgroups and web forums.
This doesn’t mean going back to stone age, nobody forces us to use actual Usenet. Freenet has decentralized newsgroups (Frost and FMS), it’s too slow, but P2P newsgroups are not an unsolvable task. Newsgroups don’t have to be text-only - if HTML e-mails are a thing, then so can be HTML is newsgroup posts.
Of course nobody will make them illegal, they benefit the same people who make laws.
A class action lawsuit of several billion people would be kind of cool. Award everyone with $1000 minimum for the last decade+ of damages and see what happens 🤗
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !canada@lemmy.ca
Watch how when we start taxing companies and the rich,all of our lives will get significantly better., even the rich assholes fighting it.
Thanks Canada!
Sincerely,
A Spiritual Canadian
On behalf of Canada, we welcome you with open arms, open hearts, open bottles of maple syrup and freshly opened cans of slightly better beer :P
If they profit off Canadians then they need to be taxed. They should use the revenue to set up fediverse services.
deleted by creator
gO Canada!
Oh that’s funny. I like you.
Yes, please tax them! We can hardly get them to pay our own taxes here in the US.
The USA should apply the same taxes.
Algorithmic advertising big tech companies (Meta, Google, Amazon, etc) generate profit at the expense of society. They blindly follow short term algorithms with no regard for their impact on society. We obviously should tax them but we should also make sure our laws enable us to prosecute people who profit by destroying society. Hold them accountable
It’s not about short\long term or anything such.
It’s about oligopoly that inserted itself at the core of the society (where town squares, pubs, inns and paper media would be in “good old times”), openly abuses it and claims it’s normal. They are basically monetizing lies and distortion.
They are also very centralized and thus anti-democratic.
Taxing is not enough. I’d say making commercial social media should be illegal as a thing. Get back to newsgroups and web forums.
This doesn’t mean going back to stone age, nobody forces us to use actual Usenet. Freenet has decentralized newsgroups (Frost and FMS), it’s too slow, but P2P newsgroups are not an unsolvable task. Newsgroups don’t have to be text-only - if HTML e-mails are a thing, then so can be HTML is newsgroup posts.
Of course nobody will make them illegal, they benefit the same people who make laws.
and break them all up
A class action lawsuit of several billion people would be kind of cool. Award everyone with $1000 minimum for the last decade+ of damages and see what happens 🤗
All while reddit and lemmy users accuse them of being right wing, neoliberal and all that.
What can be less neoliberal than mercantilism, really?
Since America refuses to, at least someone will.
AWESOME! Thank you, PMJT ❤️