Slashdot | Florida Proposes Taxing Local LANs (fwd)

[Jim Dixon]

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

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Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881