from Hacker News

Italy cancels "Google tax" on web companies

by gioi on 2/28/14, 3:02 PM with 28 comments

• by davidw on 2/28/14, 4:03 PM

  The new prime minister, Matteo Renzi, was responsible for getting rid of this. Yesterday, he was visiting a startup incubator in Treviso: http://www.h-farmventures.com/

  He's been in office since February 22nd.

  It's not a bad start, by the admittedly bad standards of Italian politics. There's a lot still to do, but Italy has so much good stuff that other countries simply will never have that, as someone said, it doesn't need to be better than Sweden, the Netherlands, and so on, it just needs to stop sucking quite so bad, and it could be a more attractive place to do business.

• by gioi on 2/28/14, 4:11 PM

  A personal note:

  Francesco Boccia (the proposer), Enrico Letta (old prime minister) and Matteo Renzi come all from the same politic party, Partito Democratico. Web tax was proposed when Matteo Renzi was already the secretary of the Party.

• by gordaco on 2/28/14, 8:41 PM

  If I'm uniderstanding correctly, this is nothing like the Spanish "Google tax", which states that aggregators (like reddit and HN... well, their spanish counterparts like Menéame) and search engines have to pay a fee to the press. Has this been discussed here? Info: http://elpais.com/elpais/2014/02/14/inenglish/1392391558_174...

• by thinkindie on 2/28/14, 10:24 PM

  still, Europe needs to fix the "double irish with a dutch sandwich" because there's indeed a problem,

• by srajbr on 2/28/14, 4:03 PM

  what the hell is "Google tax"