[[Nexus -- A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI]] ## Tax Traditionally, people and corporations paid taxes only in countries where they were physically present. But things are much trickier when physical space is augmented or replaced by cyberspace and when more and more transactions involve only the transfer of information rather than of physical goods or traditional currencies. For example, a citizen of Uruguay may daily interact online with numerous companies that might have no physical presence in Uruguay but that provide her with various services. Google provides her with free search, and ByteDance—the parent company of the TikTok application—provides her with free social media. Other foreign companies routinely target her with advertisements: Nike wants to sell her shoes, Peugeot wants to sell her a car, and Coca-Cola wants to sell her soft drinks. In order to target her, these companies buy both personal information and ad space from Google and ByteDance. In addition, Google and ByteDance use the information they harvest from her and from millions of other users to develop powerful new AI systems that they can then sell to various governments and corporations throughout the world. Thanks to such transactions, Google and ByteDance are among the richest corporations in the world. So, should her transactions with them be taxed in Uruguay? “The definition of nexus based on a physical presence should be adjusted to include the notion of a digital presence in a country.” As more transactions follow this information-for-information model, the information economy grows at the expense of the money economy, until the very concept of money becomes questionable. A person or corporation with little money in the bank but a huge data bank of information could be the wealthiest, or most powerful, entity in the country. Why do they need dollars, if they can get what they want with information?