France Looks At Possibility Of Taxing Internet Companies For Data Mining

An individual's personal data provides the "raw materials" that firms such as Google and Facebook use to make money, says report. If the proposals of a report commissioned by the French President make it onto the statute books, firms such as Facebook and Google may be made to pay a tax for data mining. France, which has long been skirmishing with the search engine giant--last year, Google threatened to exclude French websites from its search engine, after the country's culture minister proposed Google pay for content, just months after France's Supreme Court ordered Google to ban certain piracy-related words from its search terms--has been looking for ways in which to get large U.S. firms to render unto César the things which are César's, so to speak. Google's annual revenue from France is estimated at somewhere between 1.5-2 billion Euros. With public finances strain...