Struktur und Volumen des Marktes von Internetdienstleistungen mit Fokus auf Drittlandsunternehmen: Abschlussbericht an das Bundesministerium der Finanzen, Referat I A 3

This study was conducted against the background that digital services do not require a physical presence of the supplying company in the country of the recipient of the service and registration of the suppliers is only required in one EU Member State due to special taxation procedures (mini-one-stop store and VAT on eServices). It is unclear to what extent non-EU suppliers may not register and therefore fail to enforce their right to tax due to a lack of information. An evaluation of the existing empirical literature basically shows the tax sensitivity of consumer behavior. At the same time, a so-called “home bias” is identified on the basis of European studies, which tends to indicate that third-country providers are less important as a source of supply for digital services. The evaluations of the structure and volume of digital services show that individual digital service segments generate substantial sales. The “Digital Games” and “Gambling” segments stand out in particular, while many of the services in other segments such as “Classifieds” and “Dating” only generate low revenues. Depending on the segment, these are accounted for by a small number of providers (e.g. in the “Digital Music” segment) or are highly fragmented (e.g. in the “Pornographic Content” segment). The evaluation of page impressions based on Alexa also illustrates which websites within a market segment are visited particularly frequently and can therefore be identified as market leaders.