EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, has told the FinancialTimes that the EU is contemplating new powers which would enable it to address market dominance by the big technology companies, potentially by forcing them to break up their European operations or, in ‘extreme circumstances’ to exclude them from the EU single market. ‘There is a feeling from end users of these platforms that they are too big to care,’ said Commissioner Breton. A new rating system, also under consideration, would seek to add transparency around various corporate behavioural metrics, such as companies’ tax compliance.
Commenting on the proposals, Miles Dean, head of international tax at Andersen in the UK, said: ‘The big tech companies are almost all American and it would appear that this is a further attempt to bring them to heel and use competition law, in addition to state aid, to do what the digital services taxes will fail to do.
‘We already have antitrust/competition laws in the EU to prevent monopolistic behaviour. That the EU hasn’t updated the E-commerce Directive in over 20 years is astonishing, given that the e-commerce sector has seen exponential growth during this period and having such a profound effect on the global economy.’
EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, has told the FinancialTimes that the EU is contemplating new powers which would enable it to address market dominance by the big technology companies, potentially by forcing them to break up their European operations or, in ‘extreme circumstances’ to exclude them from the EU single market. ‘There is a feeling from end users of these platforms that they are too big to care,’ said Commissioner Breton. A new rating system, also under consideration, would seek to add transparency around various corporate behavioural metrics, such as companies’ tax compliance.
Commenting on the proposals, Miles Dean, head of international tax at Andersen in the UK, said: ‘The big tech companies are almost all American and it would appear that this is a further attempt to bring them to heel and use competition law, in addition to state aid, to do what the digital services taxes will fail to do.
‘We already have antitrust/competition laws in the EU to prevent monopolistic behaviour. That the EU hasn’t updated the E-commerce Directive in over 20 years is astonishing, given that the e-commerce sector has seen exponential growth during this period and having such a profound effect on the global economy.’
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