davidw
About
- Username
- davidw
- Joined
- Visits
- 185
- Last Active
- Roles
- member
- Points
- 4,741
- Badges
- 1
- Posts
- 2,184
Reactions
-
Cupertino returns $12.1 million to Apple after long-running sales tax dispute
mpantone said:
The previous linked article from October 2024:randominternetperson said:That scrutiny led to the CDTFA's 2023 audit. The agency concluded that tax revenue from Apple's online transactions should be distributed across the state based on where purchases were actually made or delivered -- not where the company is headquartered.
So, why is the money refunded to Apple, and not those other municipalities across the state?
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/10/04/cupertino-wins-and-loses-millions-over-californias-apple-tax-ruling?utm_medium=social&utm_source=ai_forums
explains that in a little more detail.
Basically the City of Cupertino gets to keep the tax revenue from 2023 (when the investigation started) until now (2025). A new system will be put into place by the State of California where digital sales tax revenue is collected will go into a new system designed to spread the revenue statewide based on where the digital buyer placed the transaction.
This is just a short term reprieve for the City of Cupertino. They need to figure out fairly quickly how to set their budget accordingly due to a change in expected sales tax revenue from 2025 onward. Apart from Apple, Cupertino is basically a bedroom community with very little retail. It doesn't even have a proper legacy downtown district and its one shopping mall, Vallco failed and is mostly dead.
Read the other article carefully. But the basic gist is that the state has not yet set up the process to disperse that tax revenue yet. As the other article mentions, the ruling affects other California companies with digital retail sales. I'm guessing that companies like Meta (Menlo Park), Alphabet (Mountain View), Netflix (Los Gatos) will be affected as well as maybe others such as Sony Interactive Entertainment (a.k.a. PlayStation) which is headquartered in Redwood City.
Note that for physical goods, there is a long standing system in place that collects sales tax calculated at the point of sale (defined as where the buyer takes possession of the purchased goods). California has a base sales tax however many counties and some municipalities have add-on taxes that increase that amount. So someone buying Gadget A in San Francisco will pay a different sales tax rate than someone in Mendocino County.
This ruling is for digital sales so there is no localized sales tax collection system yet in place. This probably means additional work for Apple (and other digital merchants) who will need to use things like FIPS county codes, ZIP codes, etc. to determine exact sales taxes to be collected just as they do for physical goods (like buying AirPods from store.apple.com).
Until now Apple just collected sales tax based on their location in Cupertino, CA (Santa Clara County) and remitted what was required to the state and county. They did not collect anything more or less. The CDTFA's decision is not retroactive.
It's not "digital sales tax" on digital goods. It's sales tax on "online" sales of tangible goods.In CA, digital goods are not taxed at all. Here in CA, it has been a long standing State sales tax policy that intangible goods are not subject to sales tax. We here do not have to pay any sales tax on online sales of apps, ebooks, digital downloaded music, music or video streaming or news publishing subscriptions, any software delivered over the internet, etc.. In CA, Xbox users have to pay sales tax on a game on a physical media purchased from a Game Stop or on Amazon, but not for the same game downloaded from the Microsoft Store on their Xbox. Other States do have sales tax or some other tax like an entertainment tax, on digital goods.From what I remembered, this all started when counties where Apple have warehouses, were complaining that they should be entitled to some of the sale tax revenue, when products that are purchased online, were shipped from their warehouses. (At the time, I remember counties of Apple warehouses in San Pedro and Sacramento were complaining about loss sales tax revenue, but other counties with an Apple warehouse might have been involved in the suit.) If the Apple item shipped from an Apple Store, the location of the Apple Store received the local sales tax. But since warehouses are not retail stores opened to the public, the sales tax on items shipped from them ended up in Cupertino coffers.The reason why Apple got the refund is because Cupertino had a deal with Apple where Cupertino would rebate a small percentage of the sales tax revenue they received, if Apple were to charge Cupertino local sales tax on all CA online sales delivered from any Apple CA warehouses. These type of deals are (or were not) illegal (in CA) and a common practice in most counties. Even retailers like Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Costco, etc., receives such offers as an incentive to open a retail store in the county. Local sales tax is a huge revenue generator for most counties. And since Cupertino was allowed to keep the sales tax revenue from the last year that CA would allow them to offer Apple such a deal, they owe Apple a small percentage of the sales tax revenue that they (Cupertino) got to keep.
-
France fines Apple over App Tracking Transparency, but doesn't order changes
beowulfschmidt said:avon b7 said:
The Reuters article is a little clearer on that point.beowulfschmidt said:If they had said, "ATT is fine, but Apple has to follow the same rules, so since you didn't, we're fining you," that would have been pretty legit.Instead they said, "ATT is fine, nothing wrong with it. But we're going to fine you anyway. Because we can, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it."
"Coeuré told reporters the regulator had not spelled out how Apple should change its app, but that it was up to the company to make sure it now complied with the ruling.
The compliance process could take some time, he added, because Apple was waiting for rulings on regulators in Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania who are also investigating the ATT tool."
https://www.reuters.com/technology/french-antitrust-regulator-fines-apple-150-million-euros-over-privacy-tool-2025-03-31/
On the size of the fine, that was also tackled head on (it was proportional):
"We apply competition law in an apolitical manner," Benoit Coeure told a press conference."
While maximum fines can be up to 10% of global revenue (and it's global as a dissuasory measure), the fines still have to be proportional and take into account other factors such as reincidence.
"We're not going to tell you how to fix your app to avoid this fine, but you'd better change it, or we're going to keep fining you."
"Bring me a rock. No, not that one."
That's like if you were driving along, get pulled over by the police and handed a fix-it ticket, but the police don't tell you what needs fixing. And if you don't bring proof that you fixed the problem (to traffic court) by the time stated on the ticket, you will get another ticket that can amount to 10% of your income, for not fixing it.
-
France fines Apple over App Tracking Transparency, but doesn't order changes
beowulfschmidt said:If they had said, "ATT is fine, but Apple has to follow the same rules, so since you didn't, we're fining you," that would have been pretty legit.Instead they said, "ATT is fine, nothing wrong with it. But we're going to fine you anyway. Because we can, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it."But Apple do follow the same ATT rules. The ATT do not restrict app developers from tracking their customers while using any of the developers apps. The ATT only restrict app developers from tracking their customers while using a third party app, unless given permission to under ATT. If a developer do not track their app customers across third party apps, there is no need for their apps to have an ATT option. This is the way it's suppose to work.Apple do not track their app users across third party apps. (At least not for the purpose of data mining for targeted ads.) In other words, Apple Music customers are not tracked when they open a browser or use Google Maps or check the news using a Wall Street app or while checking their GMail, while still listening to Apple Music. But Facebook will track their customers when they get on the internet or use other third party apps, access location data, etc., if they still have their Facebook app (or any app Facebook owns.) open. Facebook is always allowed to track their customer while using any Facebook apps. Being tracked while using a third party app is what ATT alerts the users to and they are given the option to deny Facebook from doing this. If Apple were to track their app users across third party apps, I'm sure they too would allow their users to prevent this with an ATT option.BTW- This is why Facebook is so Hell bent about forcing Apple to allow other browser engines on iOS. Facebook want to have a browser inside their own Facebook app. Thus not having to inform their users under ATT, that they are being tracked while browsing the internet with a browser that opens up inside their Facebook app.
-
EU antitrust agency may not fine Apple much to avoid tariff war escalation
nubus said:
Are you calling Reagan, Nixon, Bush, and Trump socialists? Look at the list: https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and-percentage-7371225. Of modern presidents the big spenders are all from one party. Bush (1) did worse in 4 years than Obama in 8. Trump 1 did worse than Biden (that had to clean-up after Covid). Trump is known to run out of other peoples money. Doesn't make him a socialist.davidw said:
The DMA was written and enacted, to have the 5 largest US tech companies solve the age-old problem with Socialism eventually running out of other peoples money.Once again, you went off on one of your fallacy of logic bad analogy rant and completely misunderstood M. Thatcher quote.Neither Reagan, Nixon, Bush, Trump, Obama, Biden, JFK, Carter or any other POTUS in the last 75 years (except for maybe Clinton, who did manage to balance the budget, at least on paper) ...... ran out of other people's money. They all ran out of the revenue that the government collected from taxing its citizens and then went ahead and borrowed the money they needed. Thus increasing the US deficit. There were still plenty of wealthy people in the US that they could had more heavily taxed, in order to collect more money for the government ...... before running out of other people's money.When M.Thatcher made that quote, she was referencing the UK Labour Party. A party that has historically favored using more taxation of the wealthy, as a means of redistributing wealth. And by "wealth", it doesn't necessarily means handing over money to the less wealthy. Paying for more free government services in the name of socialism could be considered ..... distribution of "wealth".The common sense notion is that if a government were to tax the Hell out of the wealthy, in order to pay for the cost of running a government that caters to Socialism, the government would eventually run out of wealthy people to tax. Here in the US, the top 10% income earners pays 72% of the collected income tax (Federal) with the top 1% of that 10% paying 40% of it. But for now, the wealthy still choose to stay in the US and pay the taxes. If any US politician can be labeled as a socialist, it's Sen. Bernie Sanders. And there are more than a dozen US politicians that are closet Socialist, but hide under the label of "Progressive".CA is a microscopic look on the effect of levying more and more taxes on the wealthy. The end game being that CA will run out of other people's money. "Other people" here being the wealthy that accounts for 50% of CA income tax revenue.There are no Socialist States in the EU. The last being maybe Poland, Hungary and of course East Germany from last century. All EU countries base their social network on Socialism and depend on an economy based on capitalism to fund it. It's actually the same way here in the US, only our social network isn't as close to Socialism as many say it aught to be. The last thing the EU want to do is have an economy based on Socialism. Otherwise they will run out of other people's money.The last thing the EU would want is to have the 5 largest US tech companies leave the EU or to even slow down doing business in the EU because of the fear of possibly losing 10% of their global revenue in fines, due to made up anti-competitive numbers that the DMA is composed of. Some say that the 10% of global revenue fine (for violating the DMA) , is to deter the 5 largest US tech company from violating the DMA in the first place. But what the possible 10% of global revenue fine (for violating the DMA) is actually doing is attracting EU countries into finding creative ways in which the 5 largest US tech companies are bring anti-competitive under the DMA, by taking advantage of the vagueness that was purposely built into the DMA.
-
EU antitrust agency may not fine Apple much to avoid tariff war escalation
anonymouse said:This just further exposes the extortion racket that the DMA is. The calculus is now, "How much can we get without it costing us more?"
The DMA was never written and enacted, to solve any anti-competitive problems the EU was having with the 5 largest US tech companies. The DMA was written and enacted, to have the 5 largest US tech companies solve the age-old problem with Socialism eventually running out of other peoples money.
