>Just to be clear. On Italian sales, they aren't paying Italy taxes. They're not paying Ireland taxes where they claim the sales are to do a Double Irish. They're not paying Holland taxes where they route the money through to do the Dutch Sandwich. They're not paying the US taxes, they park the money in an offshore account and lobby congress to grant a tax asylum.

I know that, and that is a problem. But even if they stopped doing that, Italy could easily see none of the taxes on profit. Italy's new law doesn't actually fix the underlying problem. Instead it's a tariff that somewhat works around the problem but also bans an entire category of inter-country trade, which is quite problematic.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough when I used a hypothetical situation to illustrate why Italy's law is attacking the wrong thing.

Italy's law blocks a German corporation from selling German-served ads on German servers to Italian customers. That's a problem.

Italy's law doesn't block a German corporation from using tax loopholes to never pay anything. Therefore those loopholes shouldn't be mentioned as a justification.