Slashdot | Florida Proposes Taxing Local LANs (fwd)

[Harmon Seaver]

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