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States Fight Internet Tax Ban, Cite VoIP Concern
PetiePooo writes "From an article at PCWorld: The Multistate Tax Commission is fighting a bill which makes the moratorium on internet taxes permanent. Their complaint is that it could be interpreted to include VoIP telephony such as Packet8 and Vonage, and they would lose that lucrative tax base as people switch from incumbent providers. The House has already approved the bill. When will the politicians figure out that VoIP is a going to end up as a product, not a service? Voice will be just another form of data. Here's another related article."
...but so is a regular telephone line. sure, it's analog "data," as opposed to digital for VOIP. If we follow that argument, then we shouldn't have to pay for telephone usage, either.
So the only thing that sets them apart is being analog or digital? I think if it is used for communication, they are going to see it as a threat.
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VoIP is hardly the problem in this case - I think the main problem is that the states are so incredibly strapped for cash after Bush' gross mismanagement that they are basically are on the path to bankrupcy...
Hence, they would do anything for some extra cash, rather than realising that "yes, VoIP would be quite cool, and people should pay just as little tax on it as they do on the Internet itself"
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All of their life, Politicians spent time with a profession, most of them are old enough that their interests early on in life were something else but technology. It would seem like since it's their job to supposedly help out the people and businesses by passing fair laws, that they would have more intelligence on how technology works. In this case, all they see it as, is a revenue income for companies that may try to sell that service as a form of package, and will want to collect a bit more coin from it.
new technology developments allow getting for less something that people was forced to pay much more in the past.
What would happen (warning: tinfoil-hat example here) if somebody discovered a way to produce cheap energy or a way to transmit data at long distances without using radio waves?
Would the rulers push the use of these technologies by anyone, or rather immediately find a way to tax whatever material/media/principle thay're based on after being lobbied (bought) by the already estabilished industries?
Of course it has nothing to do with state legislatures and governors spending money like a drunken sailor in a whore house when tax receipts were temporarily boosted by a booming economy and soaring stock market. The jerks in my state spent every dime that came in to the state treasury, with no consideration for what was going to happen when the bubble burst. As far as they were concerned, it was "free money", and they wasted no time in thinking up new ways to spend it.
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Don't regulate the 'net, let the community take care of that.
I said that before.
will they tax the online time or data that is transmitted. and will i get a refund for unwanted data (like spam) or what? and what if you get you data from another country? or another countryman gets data from you? how come that you should pay for something that is wanted by another guy in a country that doesn't tax data? do i also have to pay for the data sent by a malicious worm?
questions over question...
".Sig Stealer" was here
When was the last time you carried a box of VoIP out of a store or had it shipped by UPS... seems more like a service to me...
Why don't you like that? I think it'd be great to have people come to realize that bandwidth is a finite resource. Your ISP only has a few OC-whatevers. Mine has a single T-3 (45mbps) feeding about 3000 customers with DSL and another 3000 with dialup. We are told that we are buying a 1.5mbps DSL line, but there just isn't enough pipe to give everyone what they are paying for.
I think it'd be great that these customers would only grab things off the internet worth paying for. Maybe people would realize that downloading Girls-Gone-Wild and pirate ISOs just isn't worth it. It wouldn't bother me to pay $3 to try out RedHat 9.1 beta, so I'd be, basicly, unaffected.
The only problem with a varible bill is that you can never count on a specific price. Electricity and water usage is always about tha same. But have you ever gotten a big bill after washing your car or hosting a weekend LAN party? It'd suck to not know till the end of the month how much my DSL bill is.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Nobody's talking about installing a service-detecting tax machine at ISPs to detect VoIP connections and tax them, so let's lose the "It's just another form of data" claims right here. What they're talking about taxing VoIP that replaces phone service, which is really a phone service that's delivered over VoIP rather than a standard POTS twisted pair.
It's still phone service. Phone service that's delivered over airwaves, and often is digital these days, is called cellular and that's been taxed since the day it started. Why does VoIP's phone service deserve an exemption?
This is a Good Thing(tm). The fewer tax streams, the better. It is vastly preferable to be taxed once (say, on income and capital gains, because it needs to be progressive) and be done with it. Taxing citizens 2-5 times on the same money only creates government incentives that are hard to manage. This is a prime example -- government effectively working against the people because of a too-complex tax picture.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
The whole argument is that America is becoming a more service-oriented industry, rather than a product-oriented industry. Sales taxes are grabbing less and less of the total economy.
Sales tax worked well in the 50s, when all your needs were purchased goods.
Also, if you raise taxes on physical goods, you end up getting more tax money from the people who depend more on physical goods than on services. Everyone needs clothes, not everyone needs a broadband internet connection.
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I'm a registered democrat, but only because I lean slightly left of center as opposed to right of center.
I'm pro-gun (typically a conservative trait), but I'm also pro-choice (that disqualifies me from being a true conservative, I suppose). I don't favor taxes (I must be an evil republican), but I don't favor the death penalty either (wait, I must be a bleeding heart). I support the idea of gay marriage (now the neocons surely won't accept me!) but I don't care much for welfare (so maybe I'm conservative after all...).
Goddamnit, it's time that people stop seeing things in black and white!
I'm a democrat but I agree with republicans every day. And republicans agree with me. Not on everything, mind you, but nobody is required to vote a straight ticket. You should vote for the candidate you feel represents your stance on the issues, regardless of which party they're aligned with. If you're a registered republican that doesn't mean that you can't vote for a democrat when he makes sense, and vice versa.
The fact that I'm pro-choice doesn't make me a left-wing nutcase. The fact that I don't like the idea of subsidizing people who are too lazy to find a job and too careless to bother with birth control and wind up with 6 kids whose lives are paid for with my tax dollars doesn't mean I hang out with Rush Limbaugh. The fact is, I can take a liberal stance on one issue and a conservative stance on another. And regardless of how I'm registered, I can and will vote for any damned person I please.
I've voted for republicans and I'll do it again, despite the fact that I'm a registered democrat. There are a fair share of politicians from both parties who "get it." (Arguably there aren't enough from either camp who "get it," especially when it comes to technology, but such is life.) There are also a fair share of politicians from both parties who clearly don't "get it." The ones who don't "get it" - for my own personal value of "getting it" - will not be getting my vote. I don't care what their party affiliation is.
Just because Chris Cannon is a republican doesn't mean that he and I can't see eye to eye on something. Today, we do see eye to eye on the issue of internet commerce. Tomorrow, on some other issue, who knows.
In America, voting is not only a right, it's a duty. Just remember to vote for the candidate, not for the party.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
On my phone bill, I pay almost 30% to fees and taxes. On VOIP, will they try to add FCC and associated infrastructure charges when the infrastructure is now irrelevant? I can understand paying a 911 tax (somewhat) but paying a charge that is supposed to cover the cost of the wires seems a bit ridiculous. I can't see them letting go of this money, both in taxes and in fees.
There's another factor at work (I concede that the tax revenue issue is a powerful one with our elected lawmakers). The telephone companies in the US and everywhere else, AFAIK, are grass roots organizations. Telephone company workers live in every neighborhood and are generally helpful and well liked people (I'm not referring to telco execs, who are mainly evil pond scum). The telcos know this, and when a threat arises to the interests of the telco, the communcations workers are deployed to write letters and knock on doors. Eat your heart out, Ralph Nader.
In addition, the telcos have a huge installed base of ever-vigilent retirees who are very aware of any threat to their pension fund. Retirees have nothing but time, and you can get a busload of them to a demonstration at the state capitol in no time flat.
Further, law makers have been trained to think of the "phone company" as their main contact for all communications matters and for information on communications policy. When telecom decentralizes over IP networks, suddenly Joe Legislator is faced with calling up a bunch of Joe Sixpacks to ask them what they think.
In other words, it's not an easy or quick matter to usher out an obsolete industry. It looses its dying grip on the economy very slowly, and can take down a lot of innocents with it as it goes. The coal industry is still into the federal taxpayer for retiree funding...the railroad industry much the same (and it relinquished it monopoly to the trucking industry only after a 20 year running battle)...I remember that Western Union (telegraph!) still had an office in my home town in the 1990s (although they mostly sold and cashed money orders).
If business and economics were ruled by logic, sure, the telcos would be dead right now. But it ain't that easy or that simple.
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When was the last time you carried a box of VoIP out of a store or had it shipped by UPS... seems more like a service to me...
Nope.
Your ISP provides a service (internet connectivity).
VoIP is nothing more than the VoIP phone that you carry out of the store that enables you to use it for voice.
What you are saying is equivalent to proposing to tax people who buy fax machines or answering machines to get added value out of their (current) phone service, because "fax is a service" and "automated call answering" is a service.
When you buy your VoIP software product that lets you make the calls... using the data transfer service of the internet