Government wants to send a project to tax big techs in the first semester – 02/29/2024 – Tech

The federal government intends to send a bill to the National Congress by the end of June to tax large technology companies and direct the resources obtained towards digital inclusion.

According to Minister Juscelino Filho (Communications), the creation of the text will be carried out in dialogue with companies in the sector. He said that the proposal is being prepared by the ministry and has not been presented to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).

“It is time for technology giants to be called upon to contribute more effectively to expanding connectivity,” said the minister during a sector event in Barcelona, ​​Spain.

He sees the measure as an opportunity to bring internet to the poorest and communities in order to reduce social inequalities. For him, this is a social duty to be fulfilled by these companies.

For the minister, technology giants, known by the English term big techs, massively use Brazilian infrastructure without providing any compensation for it.

He says that the issue should be debated separately from other regulatory discussions about content transmitted through platforms, to be better received and understood by parliamentarians.

The taxation of big techs is a topic under debate not only in Brazil. The difficulty lies in taxing the profits of these companies, whose headquarters are abroad — mainly in tax havens, such as Luxembourg.

In 2019, the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) proposed a global reform in corporate taxation, changing rules that existed a century ago that allowed technology companies to transfer profits from one point to another on the planet in order to minimize their tax costs. .

The OECD proposal allowed countries to tax a proportion of the worldwide profits of highly profitable multinationals, no matter where on the planet they were transferred.

The objective, stated the OECD at the time, would be to create a new “stable” tax system for international companies, “because the current rules, which date back to the 1920s, are no longer sufficient to guarantee a fair allocation of tax rights, in an increasingly globalized world”.

In June 2021, it was the turn of the G7 countries, a group that brings together the largest economies in the world, to reach an agreement in principle to tax these companies.

Discussions in the two groups of nations were driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, which generated fiscal problems around the world and forced the search for new sources of resources. The debates, however, are being held in the face of opposition from countries such as the United States and India.

In Brazil, Paulo Guedes, Minister of Economy under Jair Bolsonaro (PL), even proposed a digital tax, but the proposal did not move forward. The former minister’s idea was to apply a 0.2% rate on digital payments, which would hit big techs.

The Lula administration’s proposal would be another move by the government in regulating companies in the sector. Since last year, the government has been trying to pass a law regulating content published on social networks in an attempt to combat fake news with the project known as Fake News PL (bill).

There is still no consensus in the Chamber to approve anything on the subject and the proposal has been the target of strong attacks from technology companies. Google, for example, spent more than R$2 million on ads against the project.

This week, Lula defended that such an initiative should have an international scale. And he spoke about the need to “control so-called application companies” with regard to violence against democracy and violence against people.

“The concrete fact is that humanity is becoming a victim of algorithms. In other words, it is being manipulated with artificial intelligence, as has never happened at any other time in the history of humanity. Now, if that doesn’t worry the world’s democrats, I worries me”, he said in an interview with RedeTV.