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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881
