Hi John,
Lobbyists for digital giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook are using the US trade talks to try and block attempts to regulate them or make them pay taxes.
As the fourth round of US trade negotiations starts today, this new risk has been brought into the spotlight.
The Big Tech giants are the robber barons of our age. They don’t play by the rules the rest of us abide by, which means they have amassed unimaginable fortunes for their owners, and vast power over our societies.
We must find ways of controlling them and taxing them if we’re to have any hope of creating more equal and democratic societies. But the US deal could be used to let them run riot.
Can you email the chancellor Rishi Sunak now and urge him not to back down on Big Tech?
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What is at stake?
Big Tech companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber or AirBnB have become increasingly central not only to the economy to our lives - and Covid has cemented this. The fortune of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon has almost doubled during the pandemic. Yet last year, Amazon paid just £220m in direct tax on British revenue of £10.9bn - it is a master of tax avoidance.
A digital services tax is one option for trying to force taxes to be paid by these corporations. The UK and France both introduced digital services taxes this year and several other countries are considering doing the same.
At the same time concerns are growing about how society should deal with the power and influence of the giant digital platforms. Questions around how much they know about our lives, about how much of that data they market, about how they deal with hate speech, abuse and false political advertising, about the encoding of human prejudice in digital algorithms and about how they treat their workers.
Lawmakers are beginning to wake up to this - the US Congress recently hauled in the heads of Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple to grill them on their monopoly power.
Trade rules as a get out clause?
The US trade deal will have a ‘Digital trade’ chapter, but it won’t be about how to manage, regulate and tax digital trade. Quite the opposite. In the face of the growing moves to rein in their power, lobbyists for Big Tech have been clear what they want: to use trade rules to give themselves a get out clause.
They want the US trade deal to:
- ban a digital services tax (unless it was introduced globally, but the only global process around this has just been scuppered by the US)
- prohibit “unnecessary regulation of online services” (it is extremely hard for a government to prove a regulation was absolutely necessary)
- prevent privacy concerns limiting how data is shared between countries
- prevent digital platforms having liability for hate speech or other content
Threats
On top of this, the US is using the deal itself to pressure the UK over the digital services tax. US senators have said that the digital services tax could derail the whole deal, and the US administration has opened an investigation into whether it might impose trade sanctions in response to the tax.
Take action
The US trade deal cannot be allowed to interfere with attempts to tax and regulate Big Tech. The dominance of the digital giants is growing, and our societies need to be able to explore the best ways of managing and controlling their power. What that will look like isn’t clear yet, but we know it is not to have a trade deal tie our hands and stop us doing anything.
The digital services tax was introduced by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak. Can you write to him, urging him not to back down on the tax and to oppose the inclusion of rules in the deal that would prevent taxing and regulating Big Tech?
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Thank you for your support.
In solidarity
Jean Blaylock
Trade campaigner at Global Justice Now
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The US-UK trade deal could give corporations everything they want. Help us stop it.
We are campaigning to stop the toxic US trade deal which is likely to lower food standards, weaken chemical regulation, increase medicine prices and block climate action.
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