Beijing plans to hit Big tech by taxing data …

In an atmosphere of promoting "common prosperity" and the growth of the digital industry, China could impose a tax on data collected by large internet companies and related to consumers. Alibaba, which owns Taobao, and Tencent, which owns WeChat, are considered the main targets of the expected taxation, Japanese media reported. The tax rate is expected to reach 30% of the data income.

The Chinese central government has established the promotion of digital industrialization in the "14th Five Year Plan". At the latest Shanghai Stock Exchange Financial Summit meeting last month, Huang Qifan, the former mayor of Chongqing, revealed that the central government is indeed planning such a tax.

Huang Qifan said that jurisdiction and data exchange rights should be owned by the state. The internet platform collects personal data to form products and services, but it would do so in a kind of concession by the state, so some of the value generated directly or from its transactions would go to the state, just like in a public space concession.

Huang Qifan believes that the data property rights distribution relationship can roughly mimic the pattern of the distribution of intellectual property rights between the parties. Platforms with a large amount of users' personal data are expected to return 20% to 30% of the income to the company as a whole, therefore, in China, to the state. Chinese internet giants like Alibaba and Tencent have made huge profits in recent years using a large amount of accumulated data, and we can easily imagine the magnitude of the values ​​at stake.

The topic of taxation of big techs is running through the world, with more or less imaginative solutions, such as the European one of taxing turnover wherever they are generated. The management of data, collected from people, and therefore from society, could constitute a better basis for taxation, if the problem of the place of storage and processing is overcome.