Mediaset President
Fedele Confalonieri on Wednesday called on the government to tax
the international Internet giants.
"Google, Facebook and Amazon ... don't pay tax in Italy -
European countries are reacting to this, it's a wake-up call
also for Italy and our government," Confalonieri said.
Speaking to a shareholder's meeting of the media giant
owned by former premier Silvio Berlusconi, Confalonieri urged
Italy to "follow up the facts" by taxing social media and other
foreign media companies active in the peninsula at source.
"It is estimated, but we can only conjecture, that Google
alone drains advertising resources worth one and a half billion
(euros) a year, Facebook holds all the data on our youngsters
and Google is able to supply the last four years of research
carried out on its search engine - a giant digital tracking of
information on hundreds of millions of people, the consumer
orientation of all of us to sell to advertising investors," he
added.
"When the Google management says its business is not
publishing it distorts the truth and interferes with the
evidence - the truth is that it distributes editorial content
made by others, including by us, without production costs but
pocketing the advertising revenue".
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