Google survive billion Euro tax scare and open London data centre

Google has won its legal case brought by French authorities, meaning the internet giant will not have pay €1.1 billion (£970 million) in back taxes.

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The court in Paris found that Google’s Irish subsidiary was not liable for tax in France. “Google Ireland Ltd isn’t taxable in France over the period 2005-2010” the court said in a statement.

In 2015, Google only paid €6.7 million in corporate taxes in France, despite employing 700 people in the country. However, advertising contracts sold for display in France are booked through it’s subsidiary in low-tax Ireland.

This case follows a trend by European authorities cracking on technology companies who are seemingly taking advantage of a generous system.

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In June, for example, the EU fined Google a record €2.4 billion for abusing its position as a search engine business. France’s new President, Emmanuel Macron, has also reiterated this desire to pursue these companies.

In other Google news, the internet giant has built a second data centre in Europe (after Brussels), in London for the cloud computing services it rents out to third parties. The aim is to provide faster internet access times to nearby clients.

This represents a bid from Google to become a more capable cloud computing service provider. Currently, the internet giant is listed as the third best cloud computing service provider, according to a recent study. Gartner, suggested Amazon and Microsoft had a clear lead.

>See also: How will Brexit impact Google’s ‘Right to be Forgotten’? 

“GCP [Google Cloud Platform] customers throughout the British Isles and Western Europe will see significant reductions in latency when they run their workloads in the London region,” said product manager Dave Stiver.

“In cities like London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Amsterdam, our performance testing shows 40% to 82% reductions in round-trip latency when serving customer from London compared with the Belgium region.”

 

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Nick Ismail

Nick Ismail is a former editor for Information Age (from 2018 to 2022) before moving on to become Global Head of Brand Journalism at HCLTech. He has a particular interest in smart technologies, AI and...

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