Slashdot | Florida Proposes Taxing Local LANs (fwd)

[Bill Stewart]

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.)