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Cable Modem Tax Proposed by FCC
TheSync writes "News.Com has an article by Declan McCullagh that says the FCC is considering a new tax of up to 9.1% on the revenue of cable modem providers. This is an expansion of the existing universal service fund, which currently does not apply to cable services. The USF could even be expanded to wireless IP and VOIP providers as well, expanding the fund to over $13 billion."
Can someone tell me what a FCC telephone usage tax has to do with rural health care? How does the FCC have any authorization to do that?
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Because of network effects. When you add a customer (either urban or rural) to the telephone network, the network becomes that much more functional for all customers, both urban and rural.
Did you ever consider that the investment needed to get phone service to "the rest of us" urban dwellers would never have been made (would never have made sense) without the promise of Universal Phone Service to make it also useful for rural dwellers.
It took the better part of century to convince businesses that enough people would have a telephone that it makes sense to have your business directly accessible by phone. How long did it take for everybody and his brother to have a web site? Seems to me like nobody had heard about the Internet prior to 1993, and everybody was on the web by 1998. Network effects.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.