Report: France considers Internet tax

July 18, 2012 // Peter Clarke

The French government is considering ways to tax Internet based companies that contrive to sell products and services in France without paying much to the government there by way of taxes, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report.

Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are being targeted the report quotes Yves Le Mouel, head of the French Telecommunications Federation (FFT), as saying. The GAFA quartet has annual sales of around five billion euros (about $6.1 billion) in France, the report said.

It is an old question that first surfaced in the 1990s when the Internet first became popular and facilitated international sales. The idea of an internet tax was put to one side at that time because individual countries found it too difficult to address and were wary of the economic penalty of not developing as knowledge-based and Internet-enabled societies.

The French government has now launched a study due later this year that will again look at levies on Internet-based companies.

"Our fiscal system has trouble integrating new transaction forms generated by the digital economy. The result is a loss of income for public finances and a competitive disadvantage for French companies with respect to international groups which have organized themselves to evade or diminish their taxes," the report quoted French ministries as saying in a statement.

Technical papers     

• AR RF/Microwave Instrumentation Field Analyzers
• 16-Bit, 100 kSPS Low Power Successive Approximation ADC System
• Replacing the Candle in the Candelabra
• Adaptive Cell Converter Topology Enables Constant Efficiency in PFC Applications

December 15, 2011 | Texas instruments | 222901974

Unique Ser/Des technology supports encrypted video and audio content with full duplex bi-directional control channel over a single wire interface.