By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com -- Shares of big technology companies edged lower in premarket trading Monday after the G-7 group of the richest countries in the world agreed to back a minimum global corporate tax rate of 15%.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) were all down 0.4%-0.7%.
The focus now shifts to the G20 countries for a wider agreement on the new tax proposals.
The G-7 proposals are seen targeting technology companies that sell services remotely and attribute much of their profits to intellectual properly held in low-tax jurisdictions.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), the parent company of Google, was trading 0.4% lower after being down 1.7% at one stage. Sentiment for the stock was also pulled down after the search giant agreed to pay $267.48 million to France's antitrust watchdog in a case involving its ad practice
A probe by the country’s competition regulator found that Google had abused its market power in the intricate ad business online, where some of its tools have become almost essential for large publishers.
The case follows a complaint by News Corp (NASDAQ:NWSA), French news publishing group Le Figaro and Belgian press group Rossel.
The French fine may be small but the finer points hold wider ramifications as the media and publishing industry has for more than a decade accused the internet and social media giants of walking away with the revenues derived from content produced by them.
News Corp and Google were at loggerheads in Australia too early this year before the two reached a truce in February. Under a three-year agreement, the search giant will pay for news sourced from the Rupert Murdoch company.