[nrow]

How is the EU's anti-trust claims ridiculous?

Apple, and Google (and probably more companies), made special deals with Ireland and Luxembourg to pay something like <5% VAT and <5% corporate tax, while everyone else were paying >20% and >20%. And those deals largely isn't available to EU companies because they can't use the favorable US tax laws to do it.

Despite Android being open source Google forced manufacturers to not sell any other versions of it if they also wanted to sell Googles. Which of course would be disastrous for any company.

Enforcement against that is only ridiculous if you don't like competition.

[jeffbax]

Until the tax law change this year, US companies were generally at a tax dis-advantage. Whether or not tech companies were more advantaged I don't think is as simple to say as the headlines would want you to believe but a large swath of US companies were at a global disadvantage for taxes. Effective Corporate taxes in the US were of the highest, and now they're more toward the global average.

[nrow2]

They weren't at a disadvantage outside the US, that is the whole point. Apple's effective tax rate on profits in the EU, before the EC ruled otherwise, was less than 0.05% between 2011 and 2014. Money which they are using to compete in the rest of the world. For example from Apple's SEC Form 10-K, 2017:

"[...] undistributed foreign earnings, a substantial portion of which was generated by subsidiaries organized in Ireland, for which no U.S. taxes are provided when such earnings are intended to be indefinitely reinvested outside the U.S."

http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=320193-17-7... http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm

[jeffbax]

I wasn't talking about Apple specifically as the nature of digital companies is different, but US Corporations on the whole faced a ~38% tax rate globally vs. most countries being closer to 20% and this is something even the Obama administration wanted to change / partisan angles about this are dumb.

[knorker]

> while everyone else were paying >20% and >20%

Uhm, no. This is a deliberate tax loophole that the government is fine with small companies using, but only feign being upset when large companies do it too.

They could just close it, but they don't want to.

Creating local optimizations for marketplaces is what the EU is for*.

[nrow2]

What are you referring to?

Before the digital single market companies paid the rate at the country the were in. Since these companies where headquartered in Luxembourg they have been paying far lower rates over the years. Some of those rates have been to special deals directly with the government. This isn't something that has been available to most companies.

Similarly the "double Irish with a Dutch sandwich" only worked because of US tax law, simplified, lets US companies defer taxation on foreign funds through a loophole. That also isn't anything available to most companies and especially not small ones.