The other shoe just stepped on a banana peel... Cheers, Bob Hettinga --- begin forwarded text Date: Tue, 9 Sep 1997 19:57:48 +0200 (MET DST) To: dcsb@ai.mit.edu, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net Subject: Net Papa: Global Internet Taxes Inevitable From: nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) Organization: Replay and Company UnLimited X-001: Replay may or may not approve of the content of this posting X-002: Report misuse of this automated service to <abuse@replay.com> X-URL: http://www.replay.com/remailer/ Sender: bounce-dcsb@ai.mit.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) (09/09/97; 12:00 p.m. EDT) By Douglas Hayward, TechWire GENEVA -- Internet taxes are inevitable, according to the man dubbed the "Father of the Net." The only way to avoid global chaos is to create an international agreement on how to do it, added Vint Cerf at a meeting of the Internet Society here. Cerf co-developed the TCP/IP[LINK] protocol on which all Web and Net transaction depend. ...Taxation of the Internet, also called "bit taxes," must be well planned, Cerf said. "And it must also be thought through on a global scale -- not parochially," he said. In the United States. alone, there are 30,000 taxing authorities that might be interested in taxing transactions on the Internet, said Cerf, adding that right now, there is no way to determine which of those authorities should have jurisdiction over a particular transaction. ..."If something is becoming an infrastructure that is important for people's daily lives, then governments will have the right to be concerned about the public's safety and well-being," Cerf said. "When you build roads, you make rules about how people are to behave on these roads, in order to protect people." TW http://192.215.107.71/wire/news/1997/09/0909tax.html For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "dcsb-request@ai.mit.edu" with one line of text: "help". --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/