Austria seeks to tax Google search

Austria is seeking ways to make digital services like Alphabet’s Google or Facebook pay taxes for transactions with the nation’s internet users, trying to plug gaps in a tax system still designed for brick-and-mortar business.

The most ambitious part of the plan targets the business models of Twitter, Google or Facebook: The tacit pact under which searching, liking, posting and tweeting remains free as long as users let the companies feed usage data into algorithms that help tailor advertising that can be aimed at the most likely buyers.

That arrangement is a form of bartering, and a value-added tax could be imposed