Google, Facebook argue against ‘punitive’ tax proposal for digital media

Proposals for tax changes aimed at helping Canadian publishers fight for revenues with online news aggregators would result in a punitive “tax on advertisers,” executives from Google Canada and Facebook Canada told a Commons committee studying the country’s media industry. That’s because tax laws currently on the books designed to prop up the industry are archaic and simply don’t apply to the Internet age, Jason Kee, Google Canada’s head of policy and government relations, told the heritage committee Tuesday.