Digital Services Taxes, Marketer CEO/CFO Tariff Commentary + Another FTA Broadcaster On Another Digital Video Platform
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for July 5, 2025
On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week. Separately, on Agency Business, Olivia Morely interviews Chris Lowery of Chase Design Group, and I join her for a discussion of the industry’s latest news.
Weekly Work:
Digital Taxes: Global Implications of OBBBA's Section 899 Removal and the US-Canada DST Dispute
More Context:
Nothing says “holiday week” to us like an analysis of global tax rates for major sellers of advertising, and so that’s exactly what we did in context of trying to understand whether or not countries around the world are fairly or unfairly looking to apply digital services taxes to Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and others.
Nearly 20 countries around the world already apply these revenue-based taxes, largely because of past practices from digital platforms which allowed them to make the most of their global operations, reducing their tax burdens by lowering pre-tax income in countries around the world. The issue was front and center in the past week as Canada’s government announced it would cancel its new digital services tax, set to come into effect on June 30, ahead of new trade negotiations with the United States.
The reality is that cash taxes for global platforms are generally higher than the OECD’s targeted global minimum tax rate of 15%, although we note that event this level probably provides global platforms with an advantage over single-country operators. Moreover, the gap may be more pronounced in some countries relative to others, and so we don’t expect the issue of revenue-based taxes to go away any time soon. However, for the countries who believe they are being harmed by tax avoidance efforts, we think that policies encouraging domestic companies to invest against global growth opportunities of their own will probably lead to superior overall outcomes.