Digital Rent and the Universal Basic Income: Social Distribution of “User-Created Value”

This chapter examines the rationale for “user-created value” to be an essential element for the taxation on huge rent multinational corporations enjoy, beyond the means of readjusting the permanent establishment status for allocating corporate tax to individual countries. It argues that as digital rent originates from the value-producing labor of the population in the digital network, universal basic income should be an option for a fair distribution of wages and profits, separating income from employment. In addition, this chapter addresses the nature of digital rent with the concepts of place-specific and corporate-specific rents. The value of the digital platform relies heavily on the digital labor of users producing network effects in a specific place. Thus, it would be comparable to the place-specific rent of resource mining. Since public funds cover most risks and sunkness involved in intellectual property development, efforts to return corporate-specific rent to society with public equity or royalties are sufficiently justified.