Slashdot | Florida Proposes Taxing Local LANs (fwd)
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/08/25/2248224.shtml?tid=103&tid=98&tid=99 -- -- ravage@ssz.com jchoate@open-forge.com www.ssz.com www.open-forge.com
I don't get it -- exactly what do they think they would be taxing? 9% of what? The bits and bytes that flow thru? The owners already paid a sales tax on the hardware, or is this like a yearly property tax? Bizarre! On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 06:35:47PM -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/08/25/2248224.shtml?tid=103&tid=98&tid=99
-- -- ravage@ssz.com jchoate@open-forge.com www.ssz.com www.open-forge.com
-- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:
I don't get it -- exactly what do they think they would be taxing? 9% of what? The bits and bytes that flow thru? The owners already paid a sales tax on the hardware, or is this like a yearly property tax? Bizarre!
A bit tax has been proposed in the European Union several times. The general idea is to levy a tax on each bit/byte of Internet traffic that flows through some specified point or set of points. So far the Internet service providers have successfully lobbied against the tax. The US legislators obviously haven't clearly thought through their proposal yet. But it would be easy enough to, for example, reason that it costs N cents to push a megabyte down a telephone wire, and so it would be 'logical' to impose a tax 0.09 * N cents/megabyte. The LAN is just a way around the telephone wire, right?
On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 06:35:47PM -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/08/25/2248224.shtml?tid=103&tid=98&tid=99
-- Jim Dixon jdd@dixons.org tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881
On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 04:16:32PM +0100, Jim Dixon wrote:
On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:
I don't get it -- exactly what do they think they would be taxing? 9% of what? The bits and bytes that flow thru? The owners already paid a sales tax on the hardware, or is this like a yearly property tax? Bizarre!
A bit tax has been proposed in the European Union several times. The general idea is to levy a tax on each bit/byte of Internet traffic that flows through some specified point or set of points. So far the Internet service providers have successfully lobbied against the tax.
The US legislators obviously haven't clearly thought through their proposal yet. But it would be easy enough to, for example, reason that it costs N cents to push a megabyte down a telephone wire, and so it would be 'logical' to impose a tax 0.09 * N cents/megabyte. The LAN is just a way around the telephone wire, right?
No, that would be taxing the WAN, not the LAN. Which, BTW, they already do, both fed and state. Not by throughput, per se, but there's a tax on the lines, the T1's or whatever. If they tax the actual LANs, they would either have to mandate a bit meter on each LAN, or, if they are talking about a property type tax --- hmm, that could actually be a GoodThing@ -- think about it, a property tax on the LAN would mean that companies would be reluctant to buy new hardware, and, as their computers aged, they'd naturally migrate to linux to be able to get decent speed out of the ancient cpus. 8-) -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
Yes, they'll tax 9% of the packets. This means that out of 100 packets, only 91 of them will go to other hosts, the other 9 packets must be routed to the FL tax board in the form of ICMP ECHO requests. However, be advised that if you have ever lived or thought about living in Florida, this tax applies to you, so you should set your networking devices to behave accordingly. This tax applies to you, even if you live abroad. OB DISCLAIMER: This is also known in some unsavory circles as a DDoS. :^) If you actually do this, expect a visit from the Men in Black, with names such as Agent Smith, who unlike me, have no sense of humor. (I think I've had a bit too much caffeine this morning... heh...) ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of /|\ \|/ :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\ <--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech. \/|\/ /|\ :Found to date: 0. Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD. \|/ + v + : The look on Sadam's face - priceless! --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:
I don't get it -- exactly what do they think they would be taxing? 9% of what? The bits and bytes that flow thru? The owners already paid a sales tax on the hardware, or is this like a yearly property tax? Bizarre!
On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 06:35:47PM -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/08/25/2248224.shtml?tid=103&tid=98&tid=99
At 08:54 AM 08/26/2003 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
I don't get it -- exactly what do they think they would be taxing? 9% of what? The bits and bytes that flow thru? The owners already paid a sales tax on the hardware, or is this like a yearly property tax? Bizarre!
The standard joke about how you tell a computer salesman from a used car salesman is that the car salesman knows when he's lying. These incompetents like taxing things, but if they don't know what they technology is about, they *really* *really* shouldn't propose special taxes on it until they know how to count the objects they want to tax. A LAN isn't just hardware (which as you say the purchasers buy sales tax on), it's also the labor involved in installing it (which they've already charged income tax on, if it was explicitly paid for) and the labor involved in operating it (which also gets income tax collected on it.) And the prices of any of the hardware except the wire keeps dropping rapidly. In the last 15 years, we've gone from $2000 1-megabit 1baseT hubs to $20 100-meg hubs, and $1500 VAX and VME cards to $59 GigE cards and $5 100baseT cards. And how do you count the interface cards that are built in to most PCs these days? And does Wireless count as a LAN? And if it does, can you add a directional antenna and make it a WAN to avoid the tax? And is this only for LANs in businesses? Or also for LANs at home? Or is this really an excuse for the LAN Tax Police to go around with scanners trying to detect people who didn't register their LANs when they were buying that Cat5 cable at the grocery store, the way the BBC Police used to go hunting for Brits who hadn't paid their television taxes? (Probably not - this seems like a clear case of incompetence rather than malice - but it *is* the state where Jeb Bush is governor.)
Bill Stewart (2003-08-27 07:06Z) wrote:
At 08:54 AM 08/26/2003 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
I don't get it -- exactly what do they think they would be taxing? 9% of what? The bits and bytes that flow thru? The owners already paid a sales tax on the hardware, or is this like a yearly property tax? Bizarre!
The standard joke about how you tell a computer salesman from a used car salesman is that the car salesman knows when he's lying. These incompetents like taxing things, but if they don't know what they technology is about, they *really* *really* shouldn't propose special taxes on it until they know how to count the objects they want to tax.
I got the impression they want to tax the yearly depriciation of the networking equipment. Just as silly as, and perhaps even more expensive than, taxing the bits. -- No man is clever enough to Times are bad. Children no longer know all the evil he does. obey their parents, and everyone -Francois de la Rochefoucauld is writing a book. -Cicero
participants (6)
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Bill Stewart -
Harmon Seaver -
Jim Choate -
Jim Dixon -
Justin -
Sunder