Amazon and the Price of Fiscal Impunity

Source: Corriere della Sera – “Amazon, €511 Million to Settle with the Tax Authorities”, 15 December 2025

A cheque to close the dispute

Amazon has chosen the path of settlement with the Italian tax authorities, paying €511 million to close a long-standing dispute related to VAT evasion on distance sales carried out through its platform. The agreement concerns in particular the role of the marketplace as an intermediary for non-EU sellers who, according to the authorities, allegedly avoided tax obligations by exploiting the very architecture of the platform. Formally, this is described as a “tax settlement,” but politically and economically its significance goes far beyond that label.

The platform as a grey zone of responsibility

The central issue is not the size of the settlement, but what it leaves unresolved. Amazon has consistently argued that it is merely a technological intermediary, not responsible for the tax conduct of third-party sellers. Authorities, by contrast, have challenged this claimed neutrality, pointing out that the platform derives direct benefit from a system that facilitates transactions without ensuring full compliance with the rules. The payment closes the litigation, but it does not dissolve the structural doubt: to what extent can a Big Tech company claim to be detached from the systemic effects of its own business model?

When scale alters the balance

Five hundred million euros is an enormous sum for any traditional company. For a global giant like Amazon, however, it represents a minimal fraction of revenues and can be absorbed as an operating cost. Here lies the deeper problem: when sanctions become economically sustainable, they cease to function as deterrents. The disproportion between the scale of digital platforms and the capacity of states to impose effective rules risks turning tax law into a negotiable variable.

Taxation and algorithms: an invisible link

The Amazon case is not only about taxes, but about how algorithms organise commercial flows, responsibility and opacity. The automated management of marketplaces allows value, data and goods to move across national borders at a speed that public oversight systems struggle to match. Taxation thus becomes an algorithmic issue even before it is a legal one: what is not designed to be visible is extremely difficult to govern.

A signal for Europe, not a solution

The Italian settlement fits into a broader European context, in which institutions are attempting to reclaim fiscal and regulatory sovereignty vis-à-vis Big Tech. But ex post agreements cannot replace a structural strategy. Without clear rules on platform responsibility, the risk is that every dispute will be resolved with a cheque, leaving intact the very model that generated the conflict.

Why Algopolio engages with these cases

Algopolio closely monitors these episodes because they reveal a recurring dynamic: private platforms accumulate economic and normative power, while systemic costs are borne by the collective. Taxation, like competition and data protection, is one of the fields where the asymmetry between citizens and Big Tech becomes most evident.

Understanding these mechanisms is the first step toward challenging them. Because the problem is not only how much Big Tech companies pay, but how much power they remain free to exercise.