Comment by XorNot
3 days ago
How would tarrifs be applied on digital services?
Tarriffs are a tax on imports to the US applied by the US government.
You can't tarriff selling a service overseas, in fact since AWS in other countries is a locally incorporated entity you can't even meaningfully demand they charge more AWS in the UK is a separate corporation incorporated and taxed under UK law, for example.
Right, I'm aware of that. Which is why I don't know why you brought up tarriffs in a discussion about the "soft power" that US technology services impose.
Because you said "that's obviously intentional" as though that's a thing that could be done.
My point was that tarriffs or other trade sanctions on Europe are hardly going to change the calculus or consumption of services by Europe - the most that could be done is accelerate the migration away, but European consumers wouldn't notice a thing by those mechanisms (because US digital services are an import - "kind of" - given actual corporate structures).