The Spectator

Good on you, Google – in praise of tax avoiders

issue 25 May 2013

Anyone who googled ‘tax avoidance’ this week will have been confronted (between adverts for accountancy firms) with endless stories about Google’s own tax avoidance schemes. If the company’s reputational management team was striving to stem the flood of bad publicity, it was not succeeding. Salvation for -Google arrived only when Apple’s tax avoidance became the big story instead.

That is what the internet has created: a sometimes frightening, uncontrollable world in which information flows from place to place almost instantly and (mostly) unimpeded. Few would deny, however that the internet has had a benign and enriching influence on our lives overall.

Government officials often become bogged down in discussions to promote free trade, but the internet allows producers and consumers to leap bureaucratic barriers. If you are in London and want to buy a book, a holiday or a packet of exotic seeds, you no longer have to wait for someone to import it for you; you can do the importing yourself.

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