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Originally Posted by blynk
I think it would be pretty easy for a government to block a site from sale in Australia.
Or even if they can't then there would have to be a law to take a company to court for not paying GST
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How? DNS? Deep Packet Inspection? Anything the government comes up with will be costly to implement and easy to circumvent. The only way to really do that is to have the cooperation of the supplier, and even then you can get around it (eg use services through a VPN, for physical goods mail forwarding etc).
You can't take the companies to court either, if they don't actually have any presence in your country. Although that doesn't stop America.
So for digital services, where would they draw the line? Obviously they want to get their GST off Netflix subscriptions, but what things like WoW subscriptions, buying a skin in League of Legends, etc ? The government is going to have a very long list of companies to talk to.
A number of companies also already charge more for their digital goods in Oceanic vs other reasons (software due to distribution agreements etc), so it will be interesting to see if they raise their prices even more, or just absorb the increase as the prices were artificially inflated anyway.
Lowering the threshold for GST on physical imported goods is also problematic in NZ... keep in mind if something crosses the threshold, you don't just pay the GST... you have to pay the processing fees for applying the GST (which is a flat $60 or so? Not sure the exact number). Which could all of a sudden make your $100 item into a $200 item with shipping and all fees added on. Which isn't to say they can't lower it, they just have to be careful about how much they lower it, and potentially look at changing how the fees are collected.