[thehappypm]

I used to think this was a good idea but it ends up really, really favoring big corporations.

Startup A wants to get into a market and it buys Zoom licenses, GSuite, AWS servers, etc and pays a hefty tax bill.

Microsoft wants to get into that market? They don't have to buy any of that stuff, they already own everything. No tax dollars, lower cost to the incumbent.

[FpUser]

I am a startup among the other things. So far I feed myself and was for the last 20 years ( startup of course is not that old ). I host my own servers and also rent dedicated servers elsewhere. I have no need for GSuite and Zoom. I talk using Skype which is free. I use vertical scalability and my servers are C++ so this infrastructure serves thousands requests per second without breaking sweat from a single server. In the end my current app serves tens of thousands of clients with very little monthly costs.

Microsoft and other do own their infrastructure but if they're not renting it to clients it wastes money as it has ongoing costs so not, them using their own infra is anything but free.

[thehappypm]

You're missing the point. You still need to buy servers, right? You still pay for electricity to power those servers, right? You buy hard drives, right? Those would all be taxed transactions. Whereas Microsoft's startup would use Microsoft's existing infrastructure. Even Microsoft's hardware costs are pennies on the dollar compared to yours, so their sales tax revenue would be also.

[castlecrasher2]

yeah, the vast majority of government taxes and regulations on paper sound like they'll hurt the big guys but really just hurt the small ones