International tax advice

Tax planning for the next generation of domain names (20/05/2010)

An historic change was make to the Internet on 6th May 2010 when for the first time non-Latin web addresses went live. The Internet regulator ICANN (www.icann.org) switched on a system which allows full web addresses which contain no Latin characters.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called 'country codes' written in Arabic scripts.

The first country codes:

This move is a first step in allowing web addresses in many scripts such as Chinese, Thai, Japanese and Tamil.

More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from ICANN, who have described the change as ‘the biggest change to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago".

In 2008 Luxembourg introduced an attractive intellectual property (‘IP’) regime (‘Luxembourg IP Tax Law’) that provides for an 80% tax exemption of income derived from intellectual property as well as from capital gains realised on the sale of such IP. This benefit is of interest to companies granting or using copyrights linked to software, patents, trademarks, designs, models and internet domain names. This exemption is also given to taxpayers creating or using their own patents. This benefit is available for all companies, regardless of their origin, nationality, shareholding, structure or size.

If certain conditions are met the effective tax rate on such income is 5.76%.

Read more

Fidomes' RSS subscription

© FIDOMES S.A. - 2010

Bookmark and Share