• Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    It’s actually pretty easy to know which country an IP belongs to. ARIN, RIPE, etc all keep public databases tracking what ASN blocks are allocated to each country.

    • sugar_in_your_tea
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      5 hours ago

      And then you need to go file tax forms in each of those counties, track which ads were seen by which IP block, etc. If you’re a smallish company, that’s a nightmare, esp. if it’s relatively small numbers for each country.

      Something like sales tax/VAT is easy since you can probably have your payment processor handle it, but if you’re monetizing through ads/affiliate links, you’re in for a world of pain. That’s awful, and I honestly would just block huge swaths of the would instead of dealing with it until my business got big enough.

      If you want competition against big tech, this isn’t how you do it.

        • sugar_in_your_tea
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          3 hours ago

          I guess they could? I doubt they would if they weren’t required to though. Paying for ad space has nothing to do with taxes on revenue.