Corporate Tax Avoidance

Google IS paying taxes like everyone else. Most large corporations do not pay taxes locally, in case you do not know. If they were paying locally, they would be at disadvantage versus other organizations who know how to lower their taxes, and lose out in the end. Why focus on these three companies only when ALL other large corporations are doing the same without being threatened?

Pay a fair amount of corporate tax for example...

Laffer curve, anyone? Reduce the Corporate Tax rates and companies wouldn't have spend mony on all these contortions to avoid paying.

Depends, when the corporation is a multinational, then they can evade local taxes by various tricks and send all the profits outside the country. Thus it is necessary to close this loophole, to keep the tax money in the source country.

I was being cheeky considering big corporations always find a way to dodge taxes.

Typically corps accused of avoiding tax earn no profits after their myriad coats are applied, that's how they avoid taxes. While governments could probably do more to charge corps tax, this is a complex grey area and there is no simple way to define fair or collect taxes as accounting rules are so complex. If you tax revenue you penalise new companies, if you tax profit it is easy for corps to find costs or transfer funds to shield profits.

Rather than that, maybe people on HN want corporations to pay their taxes?

Why does everyone focus on hiking corporate taxes when the top corporations skirt around and pay 0 tax?

Does "minimizing tax contributions" need to be said? Doesn't every company pay the minimum taxes that they're allowed to pay?

Big companies make a habit of pushing their tax liabilities to the most favourable jurisdiction. As the other comment said, they would take the piss.