No, I see it as "if you're going to pretend your UK profits are nearly all made overseas, we're going to tax your revenue instead".

Which is worse luck if you're a business with real unit costs and thin margins like Amazon than if you're selling near zero marginal cost ads or software, but it'd be a lot easier to sympathise with Amazon if they'd paid a bit more than £1.7m in tax in the last year.

Nobody expects the outcome of this to be a local equivalent developing, but they do expect companies to avoid less tax.

I take your point, but I think you've over simplified the situation. For example, in days gone by, the UK tax system happily forced retailers to pay vast amounts of tax ("business rates") based on the shops they occupied in town centres. This was part of the total tax burned on retailers. Online retailers avoid this tax and thus could be considered to have an unfair advantage over bricks-and-mortar stores.

Yes, excellent point. It's not correct to say a company is more "efficient" in the market simply because it can undercut another company due to being taxed differently. If the global companies are able to still compete effectively while paying the same taxes, then they are still welcome to displace local businesses.

Can any advantage even be fair, under such an angle? If it's legal, it's "fair". Hence, laws are being updated to level the playing field, that is, to remove the advantage which to the lawmakers looks excessive (as in making traditional industries fail) and exploitable to the benefit of the local economy (they will pay because it's still profitable).

There is no global economy. The mere notion of global doesn't make sense since everything is local.

Education and healthcare are provided locally "for free", assumed to be covered by taxes. It doesn't work if everything you ever pay or buy is magically transferred abroad and skip tax collection.

Of course, these are basic services provided in most of Europe. It may be seen differently in a different location that doesn't provide these.

It's not that the foreign player is more efficient, so much that the multi-national player is avoiding taxes that the local company has to pay, by virtue of accounting games, which distorts the market.

This is an attempt at redress.