17 Ways To Regulate BigTech With Tax

Allison Christians (McGill; Google Scholar) & Tarcísio Diniz Magalhães (Antwerp; Google Scholar), 17 Ways to Regulate BigTech with Tax, 77 Tax Law. __ (2024):

BigTech’s outsize power and influence have prompted policymakers and experts in the United States and around the world to turn to taxation both for the sake of raising revenue and as a regulatory tool. There are currently at least seventeen distinct tax reform ideas circulating across the international community, some unilateral and others multilateral, all of which seek to rein in BigTech in some way. This Article examines these seventeen tax reform ideas, analyzes their pros and cons from a regulatory and distributive perspective, and compares their respective rationales and relative viability. 

In doing so, it illustrates how theory has evolved regarding the traditionally conceived boundaries of the regulatory state, with the Supreme Court’s decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair Inc. paving the way by overturning decades of archaic precedent and conventional wisdom at the U.S. state level. Applying the Supreme Court’s logic to the cross-border context, the Article concludes that the United States has a duty to cooperate with other nation states when they use the same logic to change the way they tax and regulate BigTech.