Mr. Matt Carthy:

Not to repeat anything that has just been said or anything I said earlier, it will be interesting to see what happens in Italy. There are at least two other member states considering putting unilateral digital tax regimes of some description in place. There are likely to be challenges to that if it is considered to be a distortion of the Single Market. The fundamental problem is that this proposal raises a number of questions. In terms of Facebook what does one do if a company in France advertises on Facebook, an individual in Germany hits "like" on that sponsored advertisement and then the algorithm is used by Facebook or sold to a third party to generate an economic strategy in a third country? Where exactly is the profit made and directed and which state draws it down? There are big questions. As I said earlier, the only clear answer I have is that we need to figure out a way of taxing these guys because it is unfair and unsustainable. The tech sector is likely to become much bigger in the future and if we do not find a mechanism to tax it sufficiently we know that either services will suffer or families will suffer because they will be expected to pay even more taxes.