I agree with the sentiment that they should receive equal treatment than local/smaller companies, but saying that they contribute "nothing" is unfair and ingenuous, they do in terms of creation of local jobs and the direct and indirect taxes they pay for them.
It's tremendously arrogant to think it "needs" to be there. It wasn't there for quite a long time, and i doubt it "needs" to be there.
Maybe you're talking about their engineering office. You might think they made it to please politicians, but I think the real reasons is for recruitment. There are many talented engineers in France, some of them not willing to move to Zurich, London or Silicon Valley. If they want a chance to hire them they need an office in France.
Anyway, supposing they get rid of their engineering office in Paris as a revenge, they'll still need to have a business office like they have since 2002.
"You might think they made it to please politicians"
This is not even a secret. The original office existed because of certain folks not wanting to relocate, but it was only ever grown to please politicians. It was even made into a media event with eric schmidt and the president of france.
"but I think the real reasons is for recruitment"
This is false, sorry. I wish it wasn't. As I said, i'm pretty sure this isn't even secret.
"If they want a chance to hire them they need an office in France."
I'm just going to be blunt here: They did okay without having to hire them before, they would do okay without having to hire them afterwards.
This is not a knock on french engineering folks, really, it's more a statement "there is sufficiently high quality supply of engineers elsewhere that it is not actually necessary to be there".
Heck, the engineers in france are probably even significantly more expensive than elsewhere, too.
The office was not made, or expanded, for recruitment. It was, like a lot of other companies do, to have skin in the game.
2. They need an office for business reasons, period. Whether they have engineers or not does not change their obligations to the French law and their ability to escape taxes.
3. Google's strategy is not to attract French engineers specifically, but to have offices everywhere to hire talented people where they are.
1. This is, AFAIK, not accurate for Google.
2. This was not the question. The claim was "surely they need some great presence in the 6th greatest economy", and the answer is "no, they don't". Unless you mean "an office with 2 people in it", which is kind of irrelevant to the broader point of whether google would pull out of france. Most people would see closing the engineering office as pulling out of france, the same way closing the russia engineering office was seen as pulling out of russia, etc.
I'll simply avoid engaging about what their obligations are, because it's not my area of expertise. I also don't care much, because i know that if every country tries to extract billions from google and others, like they are trying to now, there aren't enough billions to go around. So it won't end well for someone.
3. Errr, no. This is not Google's strategy, it's actually quite the opposite. Google asks people to relocate to one of the existing eng centers, and if they are unwilling, passes on them.
Google very much does not want hundreds of engineering offices, much to the disdain of a good number of people.
Google's distributed office strategy is a point of contention even within Google :)
I have. I'd be surprised if any software company of that size gave up even a single qualified engineer to avoid legal trouble (legal trouble that is entirely Google's fault and not the engineer's.) That's just not the way the market works right now.
I also worked at RedHat, IBM, and Microsoft, all of which would qualify.
I actually don't know if Google has closed offices to avoid legal trouble. But definitely, other large companies i've worked at have, in the past, decided it's not worth the hassle to have those offices when the government started pressing interesting claims (i'll just use that phrase to try to avoid taking something someone will see as a position, because i'm not the place i work for, and haven't really thought hard enough about this to have a position).
Your claim "that's just not the way the market works right now" is honestly, not something that has been a consideration at any of those companies. The pools of engineering talent in the world are too large, and most people relocate if you pay them well. The considerations were all political and strategic.
(Like I said, i haven't been involved in office closings for Google. I do have a bit of trouble seeing why they wouldn't have mostly the same considerations)
Google Beijing?
"Google Inc. has a research-and-development contract with Google France. It pays for engineers to do Google work, such as coding for the Chrome browser for Apple’s iOS. In 2013, Google France spent €34.9 million on R&D.
...
More controversial is Google France’s contract with Google Ireland, which generated the bulk of Google France’s 2013 revenue of €231 million."
They contribute a service, in this case a search engine that's miles ahead of its closest competitor, Bing. They don't "take" anything, they offer something that you're free not to use. Unlike nation states, which are happy to take whatever they want (claiming they're owed it for providing you things you may never have asked for, which are paid for by other people potentially against their will, and for which you're probably not allowed to solicit alternative providers) and your only option if you don't like it is to emigrate.
Google doesn't throw black people in prison for recreational drug use, Google doesn't prevent people from marrying who they want, Google doesn't send people to die fighting pointless wars in the middle east, or drone bomb weddings.
>but if I have to pay company tax, why don't they
If you're uncomfortable with how much taxes you pay, then blame whoever's taxing you, not Google.
One of the big things in the UK was Google claiming they sold all their adverts from the Republic of Ireland not the UK and thus could pay Irish taxes. This was despite having lots of sales staff at their London office...
This doesn't contradict my point that Google are providing service to people (or the businesses people run) in France.
> case a search engine that's miles ahead of its closest competitor, Bing
Thats debatable. Any blind studies?
But that funding could have came from anywhere. Just because the government funded something, doesn't mean that the thing would never be funded if the government didn't fund it.
>Thats debatable. Any blind studies?
Entirely anecdotal, but I've never met anyone who tried Bing and didn't switch back to Google after finding it flounders with more complex searches.
I'm not sure how one'd go about designing such a study, to avoid favouring one search engine by inadvertently testing queries it's more suited to (or picking people who make queries more suited to one than the other). Or how quality of results would be measured.
One somewhat empirical measure: Google has a much larger market share.
The USG was wise enough to fund them when they were extremely risky.
Money isn't enough to make a search engine; Baidu for instance has the Chinese government behind it but still produces worse results even for Chinese language searches than Google. Bing's had quite a lot of funding from Microsoft put into it.
Tax payer's money payed for most of the infrastructures, research and education those companies requires to operate.
How can you run a company like Google or any other without educated employees, roads, internet, etc.
Entrepreneurs love to think they built themselves alone, but they are just a product of the society they lives in.
Now as a society you can choose to either socialize or privatise your infrastructures, but you'll have to pay for them either way.
Yes, a study could show that Bing's results are x% less useful that Google's, but who would want to keep using Bing long enough to quantify the suck?
> but who would want to keep using Bing long enough to quantify the suck?
20% of the market?
Considering Microsoft popularized the dark pattern of changing preferences during auto-updates...
> Even if we believe the 20% figure,
Those are widely accepted.
> Considering Microsoft popularized the dark pattern of changing preferences during auto-updates...
You think Google never does anything like that?
http://hothardware.com/news/google-paid-apple-1-billion-for-...
http://www.wired.com/2016/04/eu-accuses-google-antitrust-vio...
> According to the complaint, Google requires companies that want to bundle Google’s apps with their products to make Google Search the default search engine on those devices. They’re even offered financial incentives to not even include any other search engines, European authorities allege.
When Google does it, it is all kosher I guess.
> Those are widely accepted.
Almost every time I saw IE, or MSN, and now Bing, I'd been tricked into using it.
MS users are rarely voluntary users, I know because I've been one.
> When Google does it
You're getting pretty defensive. Does that means you admit MS does it and the only defense is that other companies might as well?
What's your estimate of people who have tried two or more search or mapping engines and have intentionally settled on the Microsoft product?
You are the one fetishizing Google. I know MS and Google are both slimy. Google just has a better PR machine.
> and the only defense
I am not defending MS.
> What's your estimate of people who have tried two or more search or mapping engines and have intentionally settled on the Microsoft product?
Most normal people don't know what a search engine and just go with the default.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/06/google-a-web-browser-is-not...
http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/17/yeah-what-is-a-browser-anyw...
Exactly. Microsoft's users are there because they don't know about the alternatives or are locked in.
> You are the one fetishizing Google. I know MS and Google are both slimy. Google just has a better PR machine.
I see, it is a personal thing for you.
I was just saying that Microsoft's services are essentially unusable. That's not because of Bill or Ballmer, but because Bing is just bad.
The only reason I'm mentioning dark patterns is to say that it's 20% with all the cheating they can do. Not because one in five people thinks their offering has value.
No they are not. Money is always taxed when it changes ownership, as corporations are legal persons, it pays taxes on its profit. When shareholders are given some of that profit via dividends, that money is again changing ownership so it taxed as income to those shareholders. Saying something is double taxed is to misunderstand "when" tax applies. If you don't want company earnings taxed that way, don't be a C corp, but it isn't double taxing.
What you described is commonly referred to as double taxation. I merely pointed out that this is more evidence that businesses are legal entities defined by the government. If businesses weren't legal entities, this wouldn't be an issue.
However you could have noted that most corporate money is dished out as salaries and bonuses, which isn't taxed twice because the company can deduct it as a business expense.
Yes, just as liberals are referred to as leftists by conservatives, it's an inaccurate and derogatory means of referring to a perfectly normal tax practice whose sole purpose is intended to make the listener think it's unfair by glossing over the fact that money is taxed when it changes hands, not when it's earned. Anyone who calls it double taxation is participating in partisan propaganda and intentionally spreading ignorance.
Just because an opinion is majority, does not make it intelligent, nor right.
One of the fundamental take-homes of economics is that government spending is not what makes people prosperous. It may help achieve social outcomes, slice the pie more evenly, but not make it bigger. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP..., and cross reference against tax rates; most of the countries above France have lower tax/government spending. Singapore, with a purchasing-power adjusted per-capita GDP double that of France, has a top tax rate of 20%, and unlike some of the other top countries on that list doesn't have any significant supply of natural resources to fund government spending.
Education, healthcare and law enforcement is what makes people prosperous. How do you propose to have them without taxes?
Or are you saying that French government spends enough already and thus Google should avoid paying taxes if they don't feel like it?
>Or are you saying that French government spends enough already and thus Google should avoid paying taxes if they don't feel like it?
I'm saying Google's paid all the taxes it's legally required to pay and has no moral compulsion to pay any extra.
But yes, I do believe the French government spends enough already. If Singapore, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Switzerland can achieve better education, health and crime rate outcomes than France although they have less government spending, maybe the French State should work on spending what it has more efficiently rather than just trying to take more and more.
You don't know that. The court will say if this is true or not. How can you make this judgement? Do you have a law degree? Do you have experience in international tax law? Have you seen all the relevant paperwork?
>But yes, I do believe the French government spends enough already
This is not pertinent to the case. If you want the french government to tax less, go and vote for it. Campaign for it. What would happen if everybody disregards any law they don't agree with?
About the same thing that would happen if someone government used a "because we don't like it" clause to arbitrarily punish legal behavior. Essentially an anarchy where legality depends on the media-savvy lying to everyone else rather than the text or the intent of the law.
Get too successful and you'll be cut down to size by the jealous, and by those promising your money to them.
Pardon me if I see both of those as wrong, not only the one.
The advert cost is based on views (I.E. eyeballs, of said French people in France).
But robbing Peter to pay Paul is a valid political decision because you only have be appear to be doing something...
The only reason it's even a debatable issue is that they forced Google to redirect the .com domain to the .fr domain for IPs geo-located in France. No country can be trusted with this power because this is only where it starts.
The French people have already been taxed to build-out the shared infrastructure, and have payed tax ISP, etc, and will be taxed on any purchases. So why should their government get yet another cut? And of things being done in other countries.
> The government is the people. The french people say "..."
The French people did not ask to be locked into the .fr portal. That's the only way this scheme works.
When Trump is elected (or maybe Hillary) will you roll over and accept everything they demand, justifying it as the will of the people? Or do you recognize that the government very frequently acts for the good of the politicians and against the people. Up-front tax money is good for politicians; look at them, raising money, and fighting the good fight. But long-term they've just built internet walls that will be used for oppression and destroyed the goose that laid those golden eggs.