The new italian web tax introduced by the 2020 Budget Law is more in line with the directive proposal COM (2018) 148 final.
The global (750 million of generic revenues) and domestic (5.5 million of digital revenues) revenue thresholds are referred to the previous year to that of the tax application (therefore already 2019 for 2020) to verify the exceeding of the thresholds.
The tax base on which to apply the 3% tax is the total digital revenue generated everywhere multiplied by the percentage representing the part of these services connected to the italian territory. Therefore web companies must keep a specific accounting to collect monthly information on taxable income and to calculate the percentages of relevance of taxable revenues in Italy.
Unfortunately the Italian revenue threshold set at 5.5 million euro is too low compared to that of other markets similar in size to Italy; so groups with small non-core digital businesses are likely to be attracted to taxation, in contrast to the intentions of applying the tax to large web operators.
Moreover, the problem of double taxation has not been solved when the owner and manager of the web interface do not coincide. This point is present in the proposed EU directive, which clarifies how in these cases, to avoid double taxation, it is assumed that the owner of the digital interface has not provided the service.