Are Apple disrupting the tax system?

Reading this week about the European Commission’s verdict that Apple should pay €13 billion in back taxes to Ireland (even though Ireland doesn’t want it), I was reminded of Steve Jobs’s famous, if possibly apocryphal, excuse for being unkeen on charitable giving. According to a pair of his friends interviewed by the New York Times in 2011, Jobs always felt he could better serve the world by keeping the cash and expanding his company.

As excuses go, it’s a good one, not least because it may even have been true. Embedded within there, though, you’ll find a glimpse of the worldview which makes these tech behemoths all but ungovernable. Tax is the ultimate act of deference to pre-existing societal structures. Yet the core mission of any tech company is to render those structures obsolete, because they reckon they can do better. They’ve done it with CDs and cameras, taxis and bookshops.