Important to tax tech giants for news content: Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz – Times of India

NEW DELHI: Nobel prize winning economist and professor of Columbia University in New York Joseph Stiglitz backed the Australian government’s plan to tax tech giants like Google and Facebook for their news content, according to a report published in The Sydney Morning Herald.
The former World Bank chief economist, however, warned the government to be prepared for the tech companies to execute their threats.
The tax issue has for years been a highly debatable issue with Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple widely accused of limiting to a minimum, as do many multinationals, their tax liabilities in a number of countries, including Europe, France, Canada, Australia.
Stiglitz was of the view that imbalance of market power was reflected in Google and Facebook’s dominance over online ad revenues and the impact of it on social media is devastating. Hence, he termed the digital tax regulation as important for democracy.
The Sydney Herald’s report said that the Australian government is preparing to unveil its news media bargaining code, which will force the tech giants to compensate media companies for the benefits they get from having news content on their platforms. However, Google and Facebook have fiercely resisted the draft version of the code.
Google has reportedly warned Australians about its free services, while Facebook has threatened to block news content on its platforms.
In France, president Emmanuel Macron has asked tech companies to sign up to a new initiative called ‘Tech for Good Call’, thereby publicly committing them to principles including paying their share of taxes. For the past three years, Macron has sought to cajole tech giants into collaborating with governments on a series of global challenges such as fighting hate speech online, preserving privacy or contributing to state coffers.
Subsequently, the government released a list of 75 executives of tech companies that had signed up to the initiative so far, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft president Brad Smith. Apple and Amazon were notably absent from the list.
Canada also plans to impose a tax on corporations providing digital services from 2022 that will stay in place until major nations come up with a coordinated approach on taxation. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is working on a common approach to ensure digital behemoths, such as Google and Facebook Inc, pay their fair share of taxes as the coronavirus hammers budgets.
In April, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) said the coronavirus pandemic has made the situation worse and called on the British government to impose a windfall tax on global tech giants to help shore up struggling publishers.
Consequently, Facebook said that it will launch its news tab feature in Britain from next year, paying publishers for stories delivered through the world’s leading social network.
Last week, Google also said that it had signed individual agreements on copyright payments with several French newspapers and magazines, after months of wrangling over the sharing of revenues from the display of news in search results.
(With agency inputs)