Thats my point - now it's arbitrary and decided by the company who can setup whatever scheme necessary to transfer profits to where they are least taxed. Making it arbitrary for some companies how much taxes to pay in a country obviously isn't a good thing.
Maybe what it all comes down to is that it makes more sense to tax transactions and charge corporations for services (e.g use of roads) that are tax funded.
To avoid doubly charging companies that do pay taxes for profits one could charge fees for use of infrastructure and count taxes collected against those fees.
Companies like Google and Uber that use public infrastructure could be charged for it, and unless they paid enough taxes they'd owe the difference.
How much of the internet infrastructure Google should finance, or how much the cost of Ubers road use is will be somewhat arbitrary of course, just like the current situation - which is the lesser evil comes down to whether one is more comfortable leaving arbitrary decisions for tax authority bureaucrats or enterprises.
Charging for infrastructure is a bad idea. You pay the cost of building the infrastructure whether you use it or not and the cost of the marginal car or the marginal data packet is near-zero.
The whole problem with taxes is that you want tax revenue but you don't actually want to tax anything because taxing things causes people to avoid doing them. That's why everybody wants corporate income tax -- who cares if we discourage "corporate profits"? The problem is what you really end up doing is discouraging corporate profits in your country, so the profits end up somewhere else instead.
The best possible tax seems to be to impose VAT on everything, so that the rate stays low because there is a broad tax base and you're not discouraging anything in particular very much.
Fees for infrastructure are the opposite of that. A 20% VAT makes the thing 20% more expensive, which isn't that bad. An infrastructure fee for what would otherwise have been zero cost makes the thing infinity percent more expensive. It's basically the worst case scenario.
So for example a high tax on network usage is basically going to kill YouTube (and every other streaming video service) because the amount of bandwidth it uses for the amount of revenue it generates would no longer be worth it. Then your total network usage has been cut by 80% which means you need to quintuple the fee to make the amount of revenue you were expecting and it quickly snowballs from there.
Maybe what it all comes down to is that it makes more sense to tax transactions and charge corporations for services (e.g use of roads) that are tax funded.
To avoid doubly charging companies that do pay taxes for profits one could charge fees for use of infrastructure and count taxes collected against those fees.
Companies like Google and Uber that use public infrastructure could be charged for it, and unless they paid enough taxes they'd owe the difference.
How much of the internet infrastructure Google should finance, or how much the cost of Ubers road use is will be somewhat arbitrary of course, just like the current situation - which is the lesser evil comes down to whether one is more comfortable leaving arbitrary decisions for tax authority bureaucrats or enterprises.