| > if you send digital goods then the customer usually doesn't pay VAT. VAT might be annoying in the sense that it forces me to ask for an address if I'm selling software to someone who lives in the EU, but that's basically fine. I can do that as a US company, and I can pay higher taxes, that's not a problem. But if I'm building a software company, I don't have the resources to set up a foreign company to handle everyone in the EU who wants to buy a copy of my software. In practice, that requirement would mean that most single-person software teams outside of a few allowed countries can't sell to the EU. Eventually you just get a lawyer to answer questions like these, but it does kind of sound like if I'm understanding you correctly, I should just be excluding any EU residents from buying anything I make regardless of the privacy policy, unless I have a zero-knowledge product. Which... being zero-knowledge is tricky because VAT exists, and I don't think I can not collect EU resident billing addresses and still pay taxes in an auditable form. Maybe that's fine though, maybe that just means in practice you have to contract billing to a company that has an EU office, and then the problem is gone. I should have phrased this differently, I know that GDPR doesn't constrain what EU residents do. But in practice it doesn't really matter to me if it's legal for them, it matters to me if it's legal for me. I don't know, apparently I need to do more research on this. Interesting though, I appreciate you taking the time to elaborate. |