What taxes? Are they referring to the fines that are imposed for non-compliance with the domestic rules governing the provision of various internet services? These are sovereign countries - they're allowed to set the rules for what people do within their borders, just like we do. A few posts ago you were noting with approval the fines imposed on a company for violating our animal cruelty laws (which I also applaud) - do you think it would be fair for another country to regard those fines as "extra taxes" that warranted reciprocal trade consequences, if they didn't have similar rules?

Bad equivalence. Are we engaging in animal cruelty to issue pull requests for browser code? Do we have a bunch of squirrels hooked up to treadmills powering the data centers?

The broader point of the other post was to show that the Europeans like to issue regulations that target US firms. It's not a problem if everything is applied equally - for example, if a US product is demonstrably unsafe there's no universe where they'd allow that in and that's fine.

However, if those rules went so far as to dictate how the code or whatever was developed in ways that alter its development process *and* essentially places the European Union as the de facto governing regulatory body for entire world...that won't fly. That's what California tries to be in the United States with respect to emissions regulations and other things, btw.

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