At the G20 summit in Osaka, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will hold critically important meetings, the issue that many leading countries will raise is anarchism that has been escalating in economic and political arenas. Since the end of the 1940s, the U.S., which has been guiding, even building, the current global economic-political system, has been concocting a turbulent storm, especially during the Trump administration, with an anarchic approach that is shaking the foundations of the global system it helped build.
Beyond its attitude that continues to tie the hands of the World Trade Organization (WTO), its trade wars with China and the European Union are advancing to levels that will seriously harm both the world economy and American interests.
On the other hand, we are experiencing every aspect of anarchism stemming from north and central Africa, the Gulf and the Middle East, with the Eastern Mediterranean at its vortex. Including the U.S., Russia, China and England, everyone is trying to benefit from the chaos centralized around the escalating energy war in our region, where Turkey has indisputable rights regarding the energy resources based on legal, historic and geographic aspects of the issue. The fact that the U.S., the hegemonic founder of the global political economy who resents any disturbance in the system, is now the anarchist of the same system bothers Germany, France, China, India and Britain on many levels and on many issues.
Therefore, especially on the G20 platform, countries are expressing their concerns about the increasing anarchy, the abuses of liberal rules in global trade, the attack on their rights based on international law and the fact that a blind eye is being turned to these infringements. Under the leadership of Erdoğan, Turkey also astutely continues its determination to build relationships with the rising power centers of the world on the same platform with regards to its discontent over the rising anarchic environment on the global scale. Let's carefully monitor the increasing concerns over rising anarchism, aside from leading to uncontrolled power with political terror accelerating economic terror.
Global tax for digital services
The busy agenda of both Turkey and the world has left critical issues concerning the global economy and leading countries in the shadows. One of them is the global use of the internet. In the mid-1990s, when people worldwide were introduced to the internet, at a time when we had yet realized how broad and limitless it could be, the concept was referred to as the "world of the internet." However, today, it is called the "internet universe" because, like the universe, it is now an area that has yet to be fully explored. Elon Musk's free global internet network service that he plans to provide with 12,000 micro-satellites on the global scale has already begun to seriously worry governments worldwide.
Another point is the taxation of global search engines – whose number of users and reach break records every hour of every day, of internet information and content service providers, and of social media networks. The majority of the G20 countries suffer from inadequate taxation from the sales of mobile applications, advertisements on search engines and from global companies' sales of internet information and content services in the internet's space. Therefore, the G20 finance ministers, who met prior to the G20 leaders' summit this weekend, decided to take decisive steps to more effectively tax global technology giants with international reach, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon.
The ministers agreed to set a minimum globally applicable tax level for the companies in question by the end of 2020. In addition to this, with new tax legislation that will be prepared through the mutual agreement of the G20 countries, from now on, when internet giants are taxed, the basis will be according to not where the company headquarters are located but where their customers and users are served.
This, thanks to Turkish society's ambitious position in global internet usage, means that Turkey would gain significant tax revenues. Life is getting more difficult for companies who have paid extraordinarily low taxes by benefiting from countries' tax regulations and from weak or undefined areas in taxation on the global scale. For Ireland, Scandinavian countries and some island countries, on the other hand, G20 countries plan to tighten the reigns and end tax havens. The G20 group is determined to shed light into the dark corners of the internet to implement tighter regulations and more effective taxation for a healthier democracy on the global scale.