Breakingviews: Europe’s data tax war is worthy but hard to win

Where should multinational tech companies pay income tax? Changing international rules devised a century ago will be difficult, but Europe is right that asset-light, data-hungry businesses like Google and Facebook merit fresh thinking.

The European Commission will this week propose a tax on digital groups’ revenue of around 3 percent, according to Reuters. The move aims to plug an imbalance that sees international digital companies pay a rate of 10 percent in the EU, according to the Commission, compared with non-digital businesses’ 23 percent.

Imposing a flat levy on sales is clumsy, as it penalises less profitable firms and investment. But it may help force through a better solution: the Commission will withdraw its proposal if the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development brokers a consensus on new rules.

The current ones could do with updating. Tax treaties and OECD guidelines rest on two principles from the bricks-and-mortar age. First, companies owe tax overseas in countries where they have a physical “permanent establishment”. That became controversial in France after a court ruled that Google parent Alphabet didn’t owe 1.1 billion euros in back taxes because it had no permanent establishment.

Second, the amount due is based on where economic value is created, taking into account local assets, and where risk is assumed. This means tech groups’ taxable profit is often small, since the assets supposedly accounting for much of their value – think algorithms devised in Silicon Valley – are located at home or in low-tax countries.

The Commission reckons the best solution is to introduce a “virtual” permanent establishment covering digital operations, and link taxable profit to the value created locally by harvesting citizens’ data. OECD tax lead Pascal Saint-Amans will have to flesh out these fuzzy ideas.

He’ll struggle. Expanding Europe’s slice of the pie will anger America, which wants to bring U.S. earnings home. Forging consensus on how much value is created by users’ data, such as Facebook posts or Google searches, will be fiddly.

Nonetheless there’s a good case for change. Current tax rules essentially ignore data as a source of companies’ taxable profit, despite its centrality to the algorithms and other intangible assets that supposedly create that income. However ambitious or crude its solutions, Europe has sense on its side.

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