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Ban on Internet Access Tax Dies in Senate
Justen writes "The Associated Press is reporting (via Yahoo! News) that the bill to permanently ban federal and state taxes on the Internet, via the Internet Tax Freedom Act, has died in the Senate. 'The problem arose over the definition of 'Internet access' -- services that connect consumers to the Internet. The strongest proponents for a permanent ban want to make sure that all access technologies -- from phone lines to DSL to cable modems -- get equal freedom from taxation.'"
If they'd just called it the Preserve Access to Telecommunications and Required Infrastructure for Online Transactions (PATRIOT) act, it would have swept through both houses of Congress with little opposition. Haven't our legislators learned anything?!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
The government is running scared, with the popularity of VoIP. With traditional switched phone systems, the government has all sorts of regulation (read: revenue). With VoIP; however, the regulation has gone away, simply because it is difficult, if not impossible to distinguish voice packets from data packets. Thus, the telcos see an easy route to fall under the radar of regulation.
Be careful what you wish for - regulation has its ups and downs, but I'm pretty sure I don't opt for NO regulation.
I realize regulation and taxation are two different entities, but the government doesn't often regulate that which it doesn't also tax.
So, should this pass? Who I am to say?
One ring to rule them all, and in the darkness named them...
I know its unpopular, but shouldnt internet shoping and what not be taxed? After all, they are still goods and services.
We've still gota pay tax to keep kids in school, our roads being repaired etc.
I think internet goods and services should be taxed, just like any other bloody good or service.
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
(1) Subsections (a)(b)(e) and clasues (d)(c)(f) and (fee)(fie)(foe)(fum) state that, while (2)(a)(c) and (3)(1)(a)(b(c))(d)(e) must make (1) true.
Now you can clearly see why this post make sense. And if you can't then you obviously didn't see the modus operandi behind sections (1)(e)(v)(2)(a(b(c(e(2))))).
Silly rabitt
MoFscker
Well, these are taxes that we are talking about here. The only difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to taxes is that the Democrats are a bit more public about liking to tax people. They use those funds to support "public services". Yet, both parties use taxes to fund many secret projects that cost Americans countless amounts of money, but most of those you don't hear about on the news. Anyways, that's besides the point. The fact that a bill like this came from the two party system is a shock enough to me.
Sure, the Act probably was just created to make it look like the folks on Capitol Hill were staying busy. Hell, I've watched SPAN at random and I saw an extremely long debate about how Roberto Clemente should be honored when they should be working. But, doesn't it just piss you off how, even if this was a broad-based ban (and I don't mean broad = woman), that they would still fight over it? Good God, they just won't leave anything alone. It wouldn't fucking kill them to keep taxes away from the internet, period!
This just goes to show you that Congress has a raging boner to tax you, and it's not one that is going to go down anytime soon.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
OK this may be a little controversial but I think that in the future a 'bandwidth tax' or some such thing may not be a bad idea. We supposedly moving into an age of the information economy. Some people through the Internet have more access to information than others, this information makes their life better. They can look for better jobs, be better informed on what is going on in the world and make more productive decisions accordingly. This situation will get worse as more and more services move exclusively online. The info poor will have fewer opportunities.
If you see tax as a way of re distributing wealth to help the less well off then you could conceivably charge a bandwidth tax and put the money into public net access. I know not everyone sees tax this way but it dosn't seem like that bad an idea to me
It could also be used to help fund Internet monitoring, which I know no one likes but the government is going to do it anyway so why shouldn't people who use more bandwidth pay a greater share of the cost?
Well, according to a CNET article, some senators are saying they will be negotiating over the weekend and return to the topic next week. So maybe it's not quite dead yet.
Like it or not, taxation is the basis for a stable society. No tax, no government. No government, no authority. No authority, breakdown of civil society.
Although citizens naturally prefer low-tax regimes, sometimes it's just silly: look at California's budget to see what "low tax at any price" does.
The internet is so significant, and carries so much trade, that taxation is inevitable and so long as it's sensible and not punitive, why not?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
They should pass this, seriously. You dont even have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.
Ok, first off, I'm opposed to tax in all it's forms - federal, state, property, you name it, I don't want to pay more than I have to. I'll follow that by saying that I'll bitch, moan, kvetch, vote against and otherwise harrass any of my representatives who tried to institute an internet tax.
All of that said, I don't think the senate has any right to pass this. Why? Doesn't our constitution say something about "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people". I hate taxes, but I hate the constant increase of federal control into what should be local or state matters even more.
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
I thinkn they would charge the sender, instead of the receiver. It would be like most mail. Sender pays. It might actually reduce spam.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
After talking it over with my Cisco 800, it too agress that it needs its own equal freedom and shouldn't pay any taxes because after all (as it told me) it's "only a damn router for crying out loud".
GET perfidious.org/shadow|perl
MoFscker
Indeed, and wouldn't it be irresponsible (and outside of their mandate really) for a temporarily elected group to attempt to pass a permanent ban? At most they can pass a four year ban and let the next batch decide when their turn comes around.
I like the whole "no taxes" thing, and it could continue to happen if the internet were a technology showcase used by a couple of people, however as the internet becomes (became) an integral part of our lives, and a key point of purchase for a massive value of goods and services, exempting it while continuing to tax other streams (like local retailers) is fiscally imprudent, not to mention unfair. This is the sort of policy that sounds good in theory (I mean who wants to pay taxes?), but it just doesn't work efficiently or fairly when taxes do need to be raised.
This isn't to advocate taxing the Internet, but it strikes me as completely arbitrary to completely ban taxing the Internet and not, say, ban taxing the telephone system (which is arguably more important to its users - there are more landline users than Internet users, and I suspect we're close to a point that there are more cellphone users than landline users in the US - that situation is already true in most of the rest of the world, developed and undeveloped.) If such bans are going into place, they need to cover more than a specific globally accessable TCP/IP network.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
First of all unless both paries are within the same state it should be clearly untaxable without the explicit concent of congress. It would be interstate commerce. Of course looking at the track record of the supreme court lately...
One thing I don't get the basis for the state of the customer collecting the tax money. Either congress was bought off sometime in the past or the supreme court messed up. It should be clearly the state the bussiness is in. Although if that were I case I think there might be at least some basis for taxation. Taxation from the customers state is clearly for the political/economic reason that bussiness would move to states with lower or no taxation as should be the case. Of course many of those states have higher income and property taxes to compensate so bussinesses would have to balence many factors.
The only compromise I can see is if federal goverernment imposed an interstate sales tax and redistributed said money amoung the states. It would be divied equally, by population, by where the purchasers reside or by taxation rates or a combination of many factors. That way it might not be as much money as the states would otherwide get it would but they would get something and bussinesses would have an easier job of bookkeeping and paying those taxes.
Unfortunately, the Senate is having a problem with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee trying to use classified intelligence as political weapons. If Senators had Americans as their priority instead of their seats and their party, we might have some sort of sensible legislation pass in Congress.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
permanent in the political context does not mean absolute. laws can (and are) changed and reversed over time. the permanent implies that the next batch of elected representatives (and the batches thereafter) do not have to pass laws exempting internet related products and services from taxation. but theres nothing stopping them from approving new legislation that would then enforce taxes on said products and services.
Would this bill read a lot better if things like commerce and minor were define in some official library of congress dictionary?
It seems like they are saying that for three years, no tax authority can impose additional tax on providing network access or commerce on networks. But there are so many words, I'm not sure.
One more thing, Since every legal seller and every legal buyer has an address, why shouldn't the half the value of the transaction be taxed as if the sale occurred at the sellers address and half at the buyers address?
Look, I used to say it all the time to our customers when I used to work tech support in 1996: "Don't be silly, there's no such thing as an e-mail virus. It's just text and you'd have to have some kind of broken client that attempted to execute the text. It's just another hoax like the modem tax."
I blame Microsoft for Internet taxation when (not if) we get it. ;-)
Why a difference? Because some places (like Colorado) have insanely complicated sales tax codes. Where I live, the tax districts include: state, county, city, regional transportation district, cultural facilities district, a special downtown district, and probably some others. Each district's tax depends on the nature of the goods (food, clothing, electronics, services, etc. all have different tax rates in different jurisdictions). The difference is that a local retailer can (with difficulty) figure out their tax liability based on their own address. But what address do you use for an internet retailer when decide which local sales taxes to apply?
The only solution with internet sales taxes is to use the address of the recipient. And that means that each internet retailer must figure out which of all the overlapping tax districts EVERY customer is in and the calculate the tax on each item based on the type of item and the district's tax structure and then remit them to the appropriate agency.
Its not as easy as it looks.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
[devil's advocate]
An internet tax could be a good idea. There are many technical areas the money could go to:
1) Improve the government's online services. For example, make it so we can perform more DMV actions on the web instead of waiting 5 hours in line.
2) Improve the technical capability of libraries. Get some better/quicker search engines for browsing the catalogues.
3) Fund grants to colleges doing useful research (anti-spam R&D, security, etc...)
4) Fund the anti-electronic fraud teams in the DOJ.
[/devil's advocate]
I mean, I am correct in assuming the ground telephone system is starting to die. It'll take a long time, but there just isn't as much use as a cable line, which can easily handle telephones and whatever else you throw at it. It parallels the situation of getting rid of the big polluters: it's worse for everyone, but they have friends to keep things how they are.
Then we'd arguably not need an internet tax.
Here's a hint: education isn't one of them, it's a local responsibility. And for that matter, breast cancer research doesn't belong in the Defense Budget either, but it's there. . .
Lastly, get rid of both tenure and teacher's unions: force teachers and schools to PERFORM if they want a higher paycheck and/or more funding. After all, that's the way it works for the rest of us. . .
Although I can't explain it in detail, I can give you some problems that the folks in Washington haven't solved.
So you want to tax internet transactions and allow states to do the same? Which state gets the revenue, the state of the receiver or sender? It the transaction is routed through a node in Colorado, does Colorado get a cut? If you are taxing the sender and they operate in a high-tax state, what happens if they move their server to a low tax state?
Why isn't this an incentive to move MORE technology jobs overseas? After all if internet activity is being taxed in the US, put your servers in Burma and hire a Burmese staff to administer them....viola!
The problem is that nobody has figured out how to reconcile the provincial nature of local taxation with the nebulous, location-less, nature of the internet. The ban on internet taxes was an acknowledgment of this fact and an attempt to prevent state and local governments from screwing everything up by enacting a menagerie of little taxes. The problems are still unsolved.
Except that Congress does have the right to regulate interstate commerce under the Constitution. From Article 1, Section 8;
Congress shall have the power... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes
You'll note that the internet is only "tax free" when you're not dealing with a vendor in the same state as you. So Congress does have the Constitutional authority to ban internet tax, and this power has been with the Congress since the nation was founded.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
Next thing you know the RIAA will ask for its own tax to recoup the supposed costs of piracy. They can then try to make WIFI networks impossible due to complicated tax regulations. Soon the government will have to monitor internet routers to properly access taxes, etc.
I'm sorry, what I ment to say was, "Before they went and altered the constitution so they could get their greedy little paws all over your money?". Thank you for pointing out my mistake.
PS: You'd think that after the third or fourth "fucking" it would lose it's impact, but it doesn't. It just builds and builds. Bravo, your highscool debate team must be so proud.