Google opposes Google tax plan from French websites

I can understand both sides...

But google makes billions, so why be stingy?
 
I guess if any cANCer government employee can read and stumble onto this, we might see the same happening in SA ... more ways to line pockets!!
 
And if your "French media" site is hosted outside of France?
Who then owns YOUR website and content if the government can tax it? Can you then also subtract maintenance of the site from your tax?
This has to be the stupidest thing since WinME.

What Google should do is offer affected sites a free or very, very cheap hosting plan, that will unleash the cat amongst the pigeons.
 
Both sides have a point but in terms of $$$, only one side gets anything out of it imo. So the French media just want a piece of the pie.
 
This is ridiculous. The internet is meant to be free. If you want to make money off it, then figure out your own way of monetizing it. Implementing a tax won't do anything as that money won't go to the people providing the content... Anyone with a half a brain cell knows that it will just end up in the government back pocket.
 
This will be interesting. If the law goes through it will show how much traffic is actually driven to those news websites through Google. I'm sure the lost revenue for Google will be minimal and most of the ad's on the websites will still be supplied by Google.
 
Google is directing traffic free of charge to the newspapers and they want Google to pay for it? thats just bizarre. I doubt those news papers will pay for product ads on behalf of the product owner so why should the internet be any different. The belgian newspapers did the same thing and stuffed themselves over. They eventually re indexed themselves by Google, because their visitor numbers plummeted. Its a bit hard to sell advertising if you dont have visitors. But anyway, maybe they should continue down this path, because only then will they understand.
 
Who here.. honestly reads any french websites? I dont think the internet would care too much if Google no longer had them in listings. Only french websites would suffer.
 
ghoti said:
Who here.. honestly reads any french websites? I dont think the internet would care too much if Google no longer had them in listings. Only french websites would suffer.
Click to expand...

+ 1 and people would just go somewhere else to read the news anyway... and its not like google displays the whole article. but anyway... more and more countries are wanting to get google to pay up though and that trend is worrying.. I know google wants to play nice but maybe they should just drop all traffic to all of them...
 
Maybe Google should just display a message to all French users what their government intends to do, and what the consequences would be (instead of allowing them to search). Do that for a week and see how quickly that idea gets canned.
 
Cadavre777 said:
Maybe Google should just display a message to all French users what their government intends to do, and what the consequences would be (instead of allowing them to search). Do that for a week and see how quickly that idea gets canned.
Click to expand...

+1 to that

And the French know how to protest - just check their truck drivers out.

Also - as mentioned earlier - these media sites get revenue from Google leading people to them - and then their government wants a tax for their countries website generating an income?
Google sells ads yes - not search results.

This govt official is off his trolley!
 
Absurd! Leave France off the map then! Stuff their content if they want to be so uptuse!
 
Greedy politicians. Say what you want but the money gained won't benefit anyone except government aka politicians, and they don't even own the media.
 
TelkomUseless said:
I can understand both sides...

But google makes billions, so why be stingy?
Click to expand...

So ... a few hundred million in each EU country, plus a few hundred million in each African country .. and a few billion in the US and Canada ... After all, if this is done in France, why not everywhere? Maybe get paid a fee to be listed in Google search results? And a fee for uploading your video to YouTube? And a fee for everywhere your page is used?

Eventually it all adds up, and Google won't be profitable any more.
 
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