As others have noted, it isn't nearly as easy as that. For example, perhaps you didn't realise, but there are huge numbers of small vendors selling on-line who don't use marketplace sites. There are multiple payment services with multi-billion dollar valuations that support that kind of set up, and many more smaller ones in a fast-growing field. This is not some minor edge case. This is hundreds of thousands of businesses.

Also, the workaround you proposed for the conflict between displaying tax-inclusive prices for B2C transactions and not knowing the tax rate before the sale has been made is probably insufficient to comply with consumer protection rules in most, if not all, EU states. Typically the point of the rules is precisely that the figure you show must be what the customer actually pays, without them having to do anything funny to work out the real amount. Also, under the last round of crazy EU changes earlier in 2014, if you're an on-line merchant and don't get this stuff exactly right, the penalties can be severe. Think along the lines of the customer getting to keep the product but the merchant having to refund the entire purchase price, and you're on the right kind of level.

When the law says you effectively have to record and file taxes on the same scale as, say, Amazon, because you sell e-books for 5 Euros on your site and someone from another EU country happened to buy one copy... Yes, adhering to those laws is now an unbearable burden. It is literally not commercially viable for microbusinesses and even quite a few larger but still small businesses to operate across Europe today.

Plenty of vendors have, at least temporarily, closed their doors to international sales as a direct result. The EU, or rather its ultimate predecessor, was originally created to facilitate international trade, and now they've killed a significant chunk of it overnight because they were so ignorant they didn't even know these businesses existed.

This is one of the things that has most annoyed me. I have multiple businesses, one of which is a consultancy that charges for my time and therefore lets me put a very clear lower bound on how much my time at work is worth. By that standard, the amount of time I have spent dealing with this issue on behalf of other businesses interests I have is already a loss of thousands of pounds.

So, the "correct" commercial decision for me is to just carry on with the consulting business and close down all the genuine start-up work I've been building up on the side just as some of those ideas are starting to show returns. Of course, this is exactly the "wrong" decision if your goal is to support European economies and increase long term tax revenues, because in that case you really want me to take the risks and start the new businesses that have a chance of succeeding on a larger scale, not to follow the "safe" but inevitably more limited consulting path.

We're talking about online supply of digital goods (at least for this year; it changes again in 2016). There is no shipping address.

Customers can self-certify their location, but in that case you need to correlate it with the registered bank/card location, which not all payment services will give you. This will probably change now, but certainly many services don't do it yet, while the new rules have already come into effect.

Even if you can get that information eventually, you still have the consumer protection/advertising catch-22: you can't show the correct tax-inclusive price before the sale unless you know where they are, but you don't know where they are until after the sale.

Then we get to subscription services, where you typically collect this kind of supporting data at first payment but then automatically charge again each month/quarter/year without any further customer contact to revalidate everything.

This is a complete screw-up from start to finish, and it wasn't at all well thought out, starting with the now-acknowledged fact that no-one involved in making these rules even considered the effect on thousands/millions of small businesses because they were so busy lining up their sites on Amazon and friends.

And as a director of multiple VAT-registered UK companies, I can tell you that they didn't even do that effectively. As far as I'm aware, none of my companies has received any notification about this change from HMRC, and our accountants have confirmed to me in writing that they were not notified on our behalf either. So at best, the "notification" was some aside in some paperwork a long time ago that neither we nor our accountants realised even merited a brief discussion about whether it might affect us, which is an extremely low bar.

That's impressive: 4 points stated with great authority, and every single one of them is either inapplicable to the current change or simply wrong.

1. Vendors selling on-line don't (and in most cases can't) meet the required standard of evidence for their customer's location. This is one of the big problems with the new rules, and a lot of people have been talking about it, and various national governments have taken emergency measures within the last few days to mitigate the problem temporarily having realised that they've imposed an impossible burden on small businesses.

2. Vendors are the only ones responsible for keeping their own tax records, and within the EU they are now subject to audit by any of the 28 states' national tax authorities. There are various criminal offences related to not reporting or paying the correct tax. Being misled by customer-supplied data is explicitly not a defence, because any amount of customer-supplied data only constitutes one of the required two non-conflicting data points.

3. Hiring an accountant is great, but as it turns out, even most accountants didn't realise what was about to happen. Also, hiring an accountant costs real money, and for many of the microbusinesses caught by this new set of rules, it simply won't be worth the cost of hiring them as it would take every penny the business earns just to pay the accountancy fees.

4. Again, the entire point of the new rules is that if you sell on-line, you now have obligations to every one of the 28 states in the EU. Failing to meet those obligations will be a criminal offence in your home state if you're within the EU. Time will tell what -- if anything -- happens to anyone outside the EU who refuses to register and pay the taxes.

The irony is that if they don't fix this mess quickly, it will make quite a different to big business. Specifically, big business will be the only business that can afford to keep track of the compliance rules, so small businesses will have to sell via marketplaces run by big businesses and give big businesses a substantial cut of the revenue. Amazon and friends won't need to play games basing themselves in tax-efficient places in Europe; they can just place themselves tax-efficiently on a global level and wait for all the small businesses in Europe to give them a 30% cut of everything sold on-line.

It's even more fun if you're in the EU, because apparently there are also laws that mean discriminating against customers elsewhere in the EU based on which EU nation they're from is itself illegal. According to the people citing those rules, you can sell to all or you can sell to none, but you can't sell to your home state and not to other EU states.

That said, I'm not sure how long that would stand up in court, when the defence inevitably argued that they weren't discriminating on the basis of the customer's state but on the basis of the commercial viability of the sale.

I'm blowing several moderations in this thread to make this point, but it's important enough that it needs to be made.

That is some combination of unrealistic and simply wrong.

For one thing, there are thousands of small/micro businesses -- actually, it could be millions, but no-one has accurate figures across all of Europe yet -- that are theoretically affected by the new EU VAT rules this year. The governments of the states individually and at European level completely dropped the ball on this one. They didn't even realise those businesses existed, as they have now openly admitted while panicking about the damage they've inadvertently done and now can't fix in time.

Many of those businesses have no idea they are now breaking the law. They haven't been told anything by any government authority, most of them don't have an accountant, and even if they do, even most accountants didn't see this one coming. Until this year those vendors probably weren't doing anything wrong because they were far too small to go above their state's VAT registration threshold while they sell their band's music or their knitting patterns or their e-book as a digital download. Under the new rules, there is no minimum threshold for registration any more: sell a 5 Euro download to one customer in any other EU state and you need to register either with that state's national tax authority or with your home nation's MOSS scheme.

Now, as soon as you're caught in the net, you are now into the practically impossible auditing requirements that require two non-conflicting data points to verify a customer's location. Even most payment services, marketplace sites and professional accountants can't cope with this yet, never mind your mother's side business selling PDFs of the local church's choral arrangements for a token charge to raise some money to fix the church's broken window with a simple web site and a PayPal button.

Of course, all of this is being done because you now have to charge VAT at your customer's state's rate instead of your home state's. You almost certainly don't know that yet when you first show a customer the price, because you don't have the required multiple non-conflicting data points to satisfy the audit rules. In practice, that means you probably can't comply simultaneously with both the new EU VAT rules and existing consumer protection legislation that requires prices for B2C transactions to be advertised tax-inclusive, and you will be breaking some law one way or another even if you make a good faith effort to comply.

Even if you are doing almost everything yourself and can comply with the audit and advertising rules, you then need to register with your national data protection authority because you'll have a requirement to maintain personal data about your current and past customers for 10 years and be subject to audit at any time by any of 28 different tax authorities. Or you don't need to register, because the data falls within an exception. Not even national governments are giving consistent information on this point so far.

Once you've registered with everything you need to register for, you might then wind up putting up your prices for everyone, because you're now effectively prevented from relying on the VAT threshold (though to be fair at least some EU states have taken emergency steps within the last few days to address this problem).

On top of all of that, you now have ongoing reporting obligations that probably require you to understand a minimum of two VAT-related returns (one national in your home state, one MOSS) so you can look forward to either spending several days becoming an expert on your national tax law or paying a substantial amount of money to professional accountants and hoping that you can find one that understands the new rules themselves.

I could go on (and I have, but in more useful forums and in official letters to my representatives) but if you think this change is some trivial detail that doesn't really affect anyone, you are either trolling or severely ignorant of the real implications. Please go and read euvataction.org and learn something, or just look at how many businesses are giving up according to #vatmess on Twitter. Numerous small businesses have stopped supplying to other EU nations as a direct result of this (or shut down completely) and I've seen more than one professional accountant openly saying that if you make less than four figures a year on your side business you might as well shut it down because the compliance costs are going to eat literally all of the money you ever made.

That is certainly true, and you make a fair case for your proposed set-up. In return, I offer the following more widely applicable points that would count against it:

1. You are almost completely dependent on a working mobile data connection. We are a very long way from having a near-100% reliable connection in near-100% of useful locations here in the UK, and even when we have a connection available, it is slow and has very low data caps and very high prices for increasing the amount of data beyond that. More fundamentally, our current mobile technology simply doesn't scale up enough for everyone to work as you describe in the near future, because physics.

2. Tablets are convenient for content consumption and light interaction, but poor for content creation. As various posters have already discussed, there is the screen size issue, but you also have the problem that no tiny keyboard designed to match a tablet will ever be very good ergonomically. Again, it might be fine for light interaction like sending the occasional short e-mail or posting on Facebook, but you aren't going to be seeing people typing at 100+wpm for whole days on these things, and even if they did there are the usual concerns about RSI and the like. Even high-end laptops seem less than ideal for these reasons relative to a proper desktop with a full-size keyboard.

3. The software base just isn't available for tablets/on-line. The best on-line office suites and other content creation tools are far from the level of the best native ones. Now, it's true that for a lot of people, this might not matter enough to be a deal-breaker. Most people aren't power users, and some of the communication benefits for the on-line tools might be worth more than you lose with the dumbed down interfaces. But they are generally dumbed down all the same. Try writing a serious technical spec or legal document in any on-line "office suite" service I've come across and you'd be in for a lot of frustration in my experience.

There is some truth in that, but a lot depends on the exact circumstances. For example, in some cases, the default position is now that the provider musn't actually provide until the end of the 14 day cancellation window, and if you want to get around that then various explicit acknowledgements are required from the customer about immediate supply and giving up the right to cancel once provision has started. Moreover, if the provider gets any of this stuff wrong, the penalties can be heavily one-sided in favour of the customer. As usual, whether any of this actually matters depends a lot on whether the amount of money or other risks involved are significant enough to take meaningful action. Also, if we're talking about privacy/security/data protection concerns, the consumer protection rules might not be the most relevant part of the law anyway.

(I spent a significant part of this year taking legal advice about these changes, but I'm not a lawyer myself, so you shouldn't trust the above any more than any other random legal commentary you find on the Internet.)

So your position is that one artificial legal right should not be protected because it impinges on two other artificial legal rights that you personally happen to like more?