Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

15/4/15: In Case You've Missed it: Google Reply to EU Commission


Google reply to the EU Commission charges: http://googleblog.blogspot.be/2015/04/the-search-for-harm.html. From people who created one of the most successful platforms for innovation (predominantly - innovation by others), a response to the accusations levelled by the people who never succeeded in creating anything innovative.

Still wondering why Europe is celebrating the prospect of reaching 1.2-1.4 percent growth this year as an achievement?...

Sunday, September 29, 2013

29/9/2013: Happy (one of the) Birthday(s), Google...

Cool graphic mapping evolution of Google over time (click to enlarge):


Sometime recently Google celebrated its 15th or 16th anniversary*. Whatever the date or the age is, Happy Birthday!


* Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998, but domain name google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. Officially the company recognises September 27th as its birthday, but apparently this is a new thing, since it is marked as such consistently only since 2006.


Sunday, May 26, 2013

26/5/2013: Corporate Tax Haven Ireland Weekly Links Page

"Taxes are not up to Google," Schmidt reiterated. "If the international tax regime changes we will follow. But virtually all American companies have structures like this; this is how the international tax regime works. The fact of the matter is if we pay more tax in one area, we pay less somewhere else."

Thus spoke Eric Schmidt of Google (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/22/eric-schmidt-tax) and guess what: he is right. Google is not breaking the law. It is the law that allows for countries, like Ireland, to follow beggar thy neighbour economic policies and strategies.

The issue is not the low tax rate, but the fact that various loopholes allow companies operating - allegedly in Ireland - to channel revenues from other countries into Ireland. This is not about exports from Ireland, and it is not about low tax regime in Ireland. When an MNC books revenue earned somewhere else to Dublin, MNC is not break a law. Instead, Ireland is facilitating transfer of funds that relate to value added activity elsewhere to its own economy. This, in the nutshell, summarises the entire nature of Irish economic development strategy: take value added from somewhere else and appropriate it as Irish.


And in the spirit of usual weekly posts (see thread start on Irish Corporate Tax Haven here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/05/1452013-corporate-tax-haven-ireland.html ): in this week, it is virtually impossible to list all Tax Haven Ireland links from around the world in a post, but here are some:

I shall stop there, for now...