Data tax or value-added levy?
Citizens and companies must ask themselves: What value does data have and who skims it? The second part of the question is addressed by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
This means that the same rules apply to everyone who wants to monetize data via personalized products and services. EU citizens can refuse to pay the price with their data for an offer that is perfectly tailored to them.
The GDPR safeguards citizens' rights and regulates competition. This is about generating ideas from data. Data thus develops value.
However, determining this value remains difficult. Some companies enter the data as an equity value on the balance sheet at the beginning of a project. This is likely to strengthen the supporters of a data tax.
The initial value, however, rather reflects the expectation of value creation. As long as an exact initial value cannot be determined, a data tax remains arbitrary.
The important information often only emerges when data is evaluated, combined with others and reanalyzed. The decisive factor is therefore data utilization.
In this context, justice and solidarity must continue to shape our civil society. The EU's attempt to change corporate taxation in such a way that Amazon, Google, Facebook & Co. pay tax on their profits where they generate them is a step in this direction.
The second EU initiative is called the "Digital Service Tax," which aims to tax digital sales. No agreement is yet in sight for either EU initiative.
This leaves the opportunity to take account of a key fact in the search for compromise: the physical and virtual worlds are blurring, which is shifting value creation - even within a company.
In the future, will a machine manufacturer pay more or less tax for its machines than for its digital services, such as predictive maintenance?
In the future, it will be a matter of fairly taxing the creation of value as a whole, regardless of the business model used. Equality of opportunity in a different sense could also be created with a progressive data-sharing obligation, as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, has brought into play.
Anyone who has achieved a certain degree of market power would have to share some of their data with the competition. Resistance would be programmed here, a supporting argument: Investments in IT infrastructure and technology that enable the collection and analysis of data must be taxed, but must not be penalized - as would be the case with the supposed solidarity obligation to share data.
This is because the costs of employing data scientists, for example, who make the data usable - i.e., monetizable - are added to the investment and operating costs. Data is therefore not available to companies free of charge, even if users willingly hand it over.
This aspect should be taken into account by the scientific community. The Chancellor asked them to develop a data tax. It is to be hoped that the scientists will think of a "global solution" for transferring a tax model to the digital world. A European regulation is not enough.
