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Is ICANN retiring some top-level domains? Tech businesses are used to reading about ICANN increasing the reach of the internet with more and more top-level domains - it may therefore come as a surprise that ICANN is considering retiring some of them. ICANN’s focus is country code top-level domain... Partnership taxation: still a work in progress? Given the general view of partnership taxation – “they’re just transparent, right?” – it is somewhat surprising that how a partnership interest is accounted for, or whether a pre-sale profit distribution is made, or even possibly whether that distribution... A bonanza of buzzwords – The EU on the convergence of Blockchain, AI and IoT On 21 April, the EU Blockchain Observatory & Forum (an initiative of the European Commission to accelerate blockchain innovation within the EU) published a paper entitled “Convergence of Blockchain, AI and IoT”. This is the latest in its series of themati... UK government scraps "reading tax" early due to corona lockdown The different VAT treatment of electronic publications and their physical world equivalents has long been controversial.  As discussed previously on The Lens, in the Spring Budget 2020 back in early March 2020, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that with e... “AI AI captain, setting course ahead…” – European Parliament publishes draft report on IPRs for development and deployment of AI technologies AI is front page news these days. As we have seen here on the Lens, AI can already organise our lock-down lives from the kitchen counter, produce new antibiotic compounds in the fight against bacteria and create eye-wateringly expensive artwork - the impa... When is a resident not a resident? It sounds like a bad joke, befitting of a tax lawyer in lockdown, but is really just a reminder to check the small print in double tax treaties.   It was prompted by seeing Andrea Manzitti’s post on an Italian Supreme Court decision in relation to a claim... Trust recognised as a “person”, but fails to get treaty benefits A UK trust is a “person” for the purposes of the Italy-UK double tax treaty - that is the good news coming out of a recent Italian Supreme Court decision. The bad news is that trusts may nonetheless struggle to obtain treaty benefits; they will certainly ... UPC Update: UK IP Minister confirms no UPC for UK As we discussed in a previous post here, the House of Lords EU Justice Sub-Committee met on 10 March 2020 to examine the impact that the UK's non participation in the EU’s Unified Patent Court (UPC) and Unitary Patent (UP) system would have on UK business... Is Covid-19 making hopes of UK adequacy fade further? Privacy in a pandemic Prior to the pandemic, hopes of the UK being deemed adequate by the European Commission by the end of the transition period were cautious at best. Covid-19 poses yet another obstacle. Adequacy decisions typically take around 18 months, and the UK is 13th ... ‘NHS COVID-19’ app: are privacy concerns justified? The Government’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) published a blog this week on the new NHS COVID-19 app, explaining that the origins of contact tracing in the UK could be linked back to this country’s response to the Black Death. While the registrat...