Slashdot Mirror
California Takes A Last Swing At VoIP
JamesB writes "News.com's Ben Charny reports that two California cities want to tax Internet telephony. This news comes on the eve of the FCC ruling on whether federal regulations will preempt local ones."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I Hate to say this, but the great thing about VoIP is that it doesn't need to be located in any particular city or state, Outsource it to India.
I buy my Skype credits from a site in Europe. Not sure how they are going to be convinced to share my private personal data with the State of California.
Besides, the minutes are so cheap, the government tax seekers may be in for a rude awakening when it dawns on them that even a tax as high as ten percent of one penny is still less than one penny.
It may have been a good idea if VOIP minutely rates compared to real phone rates. But the days of $80 phone calls are gone.
The lines are already paid for. Just because you're getting around having to use the expensive long distance companies doesn't mean that you're exploiting the system or anything.
"News.com's Ben Charny reports that two California cities want to tax Internet telephony. This news comes on the eve of the FCC ruling on whether federal regulations will preempt local ones."
Let's cut to the chase. What will we get out of being taxed? Will the service be more reliable? Will I get service guarentees? Will my bill be even lower? What's in it for me, if you start taxing Internet Telephony?
While it's easy to say that we shouldn't tax this or tax that, I'm reminded of Ron Kirk, when he was mayor of Dallas, who quipped, "when you are sitting at home in your virtual world and you have a short circuit and a fire breaks out, do you want us to send a virtual fire truck or a real big red fire truck?" My house was hit by lightning last year and the city of Southlake was kind enough to send a real fire engine, not just email a JPG or something.
IMHO - we need an overhaul of the tax system, I don't believe that it can be efficient to have dozens of different entities with the power to levy taxes. There's a cost to society, although it does keep all those lawyers and accountants employed.
Ihis is one thing i find strange about america (i'm an aussie) is the seperation of powers between the national government and the state government. In australia the government collects the taxes, which is distributed through to the states. The states are responsible for the running of the state, and can collect taxes on state based services (such as plane tickets), the local council can collect money in it's own area (parking etc). There is a clear hirarcy of power, the national government sets all national laws, the state sets it's state based laws, the councils set thair own laws.
It is not surprising that they are pushing for more taxes, though my guess is if they brought this to the courts it would be a tough sell.
Right now people get twitchy about taxing internet technology for fear that they will look 'anti progress.' What we need is for the VOIP companies to fight the cities, and see where things go from there.
Of course, being in california will make things tough for those trying to fight the tax.
"I Hate to say this, but the great thing about VoIP is that it doesn't need to be located in any particular city or state, Outsource it to India."
Why not? Your medical data is already over there.
NOT.
What justifies this sort of taxation?
Taxes are fine win me, as long as it's to pay for legitimate services. But I have a hard time seeing what additional government serives VoIP users need to pay for.
I think this is just a case of government seeing another opportunity to use people.
I voted against the recent CA proposition to tack a telephone surcharge on to pay for a health program. I'm obviously not against health programs, or even against taxes generally (within reason, of course). But slapping a million small taxes on each service (with a million pieces of paperwork to keep track of it all) is hopelessly inefficient and borderline dishonest. Hey gov't: if you're going to spend, then tax and admit to taxing. Stop trying to be sneaky about it.
Both are near LA, which is one of two main Republican Enclaves in California (the other being San Diego).
"I think this is just a case of government seeing another opportunity to use people."
Ask yourself this. How many states aren't running a deficit?
Part is the economy, part is the federal government not holding their end up.
"Hey gov't: if you're going to spend, then tax and admit to taxing. Stop trying to be sneaky about it."
Like all the charges businesses put upon their customers. Or charging more, for less, while keeping the apperance you're getting the same, or better.
VoIP is not going to be easy to regulate. This makes only slightly more sense then regulating something like... say, IRC. The only reason government has a need to intervene with VoIP in any way is to provide 911 services and possibly wiretapping.
Come on now, we just passed the stem cell research bond messure that we have to pay for some how. Where did you think all the money was gona come from?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
....on a tax on air. Better yet separate taxes on Nitrogen and Oxygen.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Funny how they always mention funding for police services, or the fire department, and never their own salary or the rest of the other unpopular half. For instance, the Burbank budget (pdf) for the next year forecasts
But they need a VoIP tax to pay for their police services. Right.
Oh, by the way, they're hiring.
sigs, as if you care.
I'm not entirely sure.... does this qualify?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Sure, they can tax the big players, but what are they going to do about those of us who build our own voip networks via asterisk and the like?
And if they do managed to tax the big players, who's to say they don't go offshore somewhere?
This started life as a bad idea, and it can only get worse. Time to let it die.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Yeah, it's time to move to Nevada or Arizona. I never liked the beach anyway.
/me packs up and moves away
- dshaw
Sure, VoIP calls originating in, terminating in, and passing through California don't require the state to spend any money protecting consumers, infrastructure, or corporations. All that legal, public safety, and education work that makes California exist in the VoIP world is FREE! Hahahahaha! Why should the government collect any money from the service users to spend on those things when they're FREE! FREE! FREE!
--
make install -not war
It was in the Oregonian today.
The idea is to cut the standard B&O tax a couple of tenths of a percentage, and add a tax on telecommunications, including pagers, cell phones and landlines. They want to get it to include VoIP as well.
Of course, what this will do is make the companies a little mad, because they have to keep track of it and collect the $$$ on behalf of the government taxing body, but the telcos will of course pass those costs onto the consumer...
Oh well. It's not like there are already various state and county taxes on the phone lines, cell phone towers, etc.
Yeah, if I didn't end up paying 50% or more of my income to various tax authorities and schemes such as Social Security, then I could afford to buy a house made of STONE or CONCRETE that won't burn down. I could afford to buy top-quality health insurance for life. I could save a lot of money for my retirement. Oh, but there are a few things I couldn't afford in this scenario: I couldn't afford to hire an army to go around the world invading non-threatening countries, I couldn't afford to keep 1% of the population in jail, I couldn't afford secret weapons programs and $2bil bombers that don't work. So vive la taxe! It's great that it allows us to buy all those nice shiny bombs and jails and freeways!
This entire issue is very much about reduced gov't and reduced taxation vs. increased gov't and more taxes.
State and local policiticans see VoIP is an easy mark for more tax revenue. But it's only taxable if they can control the entire telephone and long distance business thru state level regulation. So don't underestimate the determination here, both of these issues greatly increase the power of local politicians.
Since VoIP is only used by businesses and a few not-too-vocal consumers, it's an popular and easy mark to tax right now. And the common man sees lots of taxes on his home phone bills, so it's only fair that everyone else pay taxes on their phone calls, right?
The monopoly ILEC's see taxation as a matter of reducing competitors' advantage and controlling the growth of VoIP for smaller customers.
They are late to the party on VoIP and want to use taxes as a means of reducing competition for their POTS based services. It's also seen as a way of narrowing the playing field. More taxes means more regulation, more lawyers, and more barriers to competition.
What would Groucho do?
"This news comes on the eve of the FCC ruling on whether federal regulations will preempt local ones."
Gee whiz, I wonder if this government agency will choose to grant themselves more power or give it away.
(Not that I think a different set of rules for every municipality is a great idea, but freedom dies a little bit each time the federal government asserts itself into a new arena. Here come the neo-cons.)
The idea of taxing a perticular kind of data going across the internet is crazy. Is sending a .wav file considered VOIP? What if we each keep sending .wav files back and forth to carry on a conversation? What if we use Vonage, and only one person speaks? How is that different than Internet Radio?
The slippery slope from taxing VIOP to taxing everything on a protocol by protocol basis is pretty simple.
"Otherwise, anyone who wanted to offer Internet phone services could be subject to 51 different sets of state regulations."
I could be wrong, but aren't there only 50 states? Did we grow a 51st state recently? Or maybe he meant Washington, D.C., which isn't a state? Or maybe Puerto Rico, which also isn't a state, and ignores the territories of Guam and the US Virgin Islands. I guess if you want to get really technical, Virginia and Connecticut(?) are commonwealths.
Ah, I forgot about North and South California.. two completely different states.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Am I just being stupid and missing something obvious? Couldn't you just use something like iChat AV, MSN, Yahoo IM, or AIM? iChat has nice voice/video conferencing built in, and it's free and totally unmetered aside from a monthly DSL bill, of course. The next version that will ship with OS X 10.4 will be even better.
I am going to buy webcams for my family for Christmas so we can all get online and talk to each other and save the long-distance charges.
If I want to separate Nitrogen from Oxygen, just pay the oxygen tax, dont pay the Nitrogen tax!
So simple!
emt 377 emt 4
So, I met this chick at the bar. She was beautiful. I turned on my famous charm. So I was able to get her to give me her IP.
So this morning I decide to VoIP her and it turns out that she had spoofed the IP.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Baseball is done and the BoTox have won the World Series. As we wonder what Santa will bring this year our minds drift back to the ball game. We hear the announcer's voice droning on the radio and try to picture the situation. It's been a long game with players scattered over a landscape impossibly green as the snowflakes outside drop past the lamplight onto a thick white blanket.
"Bottom of the ninth. Two outs and California gets ready. Three two pitch. Swing and a miss. Strike three called. The VoIP arced just inside and down. California had no chance. So that was the last swing to end the season."
I hope California strikes out. There should be no tax on voice communications - how could it work anyways? Is it based on time? 10 cents/minute? But time can be compressed with huge bandwidth so tax away while I consume 1 second of time for my entire conversation. Even if the law is based on the time between off and on hook the system can be programmed to connect-disconnect just enough to transmit the information.
BUT if the Internet takes over all telephone communications then there will likely be a tax on the Internet overall because the Internet would have to be available everywhere. In that case taxes to pay for infrastructure improvement are acceptable.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Why doesn't the gov. just charge per 911 call? Whether that is the real reason for needing to tax VoIP, I don't know, but one thing I do know is that no one wants to have to pay more on top of the bill for broadband. It's like having a car, you can do with it what you want--the government doesn't have the right to bill you for taking your car off-roading washing it. You can do with your car what you please, just how it should stay with your broadband. I use applications such as Ventrilo and Teamspeak, now if the government wants to tax me for talkin with my friends while playing games, that's just ridiculous.
You probably want a local phone number. Do you want to tell people to call some number in India to reach you?
How often do you make a 911 call? How much does the infrastructure cost? So what should the price be? Perhaps you might want to take out insurance just in case you need to call 911?
I guess a tax on Oxygen would be fair since I use that, but what I object to is the planet wide conspiracy of forcing me to take Nitrogen along with it, inflating air usage taxes by an unfair 400%
Letter To Iran
From an earlier post: "I think this is just a case of government seeing another opportunity to use people."
Correction: You should think this is just a case of your neighbor seeing another opportunity to take away your money. Assuming we're talking about the US, "we the people" empower the government to use guns to take away resources from other people. NEVER lose site of this. It's the same notion as guns don't kill people, people kill people. Governments don't, on their own, take money from people. People USE the government to take money from people.
From another earlier post: "voip tax on businesses can be a way to focus taxation on companies that won't go broke even if taxed"
A similar notion applies here. COMPANIES DON'T PAY TAXES! Companies merely collect taxes from people and forward the money to the government. NEVER lose site of this either.
Argue these points as much as you like. Left-wing spin or right-wing spin doesn't matter. The basic fact is that people create and empower government to use the threat of deadly force to take away your property and give it to someone else. To some extent, this is usually considered okay. The other basic fact is for EVERY tax that a company pays, somewhere, somehow, their customer (which is eventually a person) pays for the tax. It may be a long path in some instances, but in the end, a PERSON pays for every tax levied on any corporation.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
Just tax internet usage. Wait, that's the tax on the payments to the ISP. Nevermind.
http://pixelcort.com/
Combine that with the fact that most people in the USA dont pay very much in taxes and you have the situation we are in now. Eventually you will reach the ideal state where Bill Gates and his buddies pay all the taxes. That is real cool until those folks say [in Cartman fashion] "screw you, I'm going [home/somewhere else...]"
I think that if taxes were spend only on what they were requested for, and ended when done, we would be a lot better off. I think they just recently ended the telco tax that was for the Spanish-American war [Circa-1898].
Do away with "the general fund".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
suspected something when her IP address was 555.555.555.555
Just a thought.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sure, they can tax the big players, but what are they going to do about those of us who build our own voip networks via asterisk and the like?
And if they do managed to tax the big players, who's to say they don't go offshore somewhere?
Obviously, the federal government will be able to implement a great firewall to shield the citizens of our freedom-loving nation from those communist tax-avoiders who wish to tear apart the open-natured moral fabric of our society.
</sarcasm>
Well, in theory, we have a very clear distinction between federal powers and state powers. The states do whatever they want until the federal government finds a way to tax it or regulate it, and somehow fits it into the "commerce clause" of the US Constitution
In australia the government collects the taxes, which is distributed through to the states. The states are responsible for the running of the state, and can collect taxes on state based services (such as plane tickets), the local council can collect money in it's own area (parking etc). There is a clear hirarcy of power, the national government sets all national laws, the state sets it's state based laws, the councils set thair own laws.
Well, in theory, we have a very clear distinction between federal powers and state powers. The states do whatever they want until the federal government finds a way to tax it or regulate it, and somehow fits it into the "commerce clause" of the US Constitution.
Given that the original framers of the Constitution designed the government to react slowly (hence the 6 year election term and rotating nature of the Senate), I almost wonder whether some ambiguity was intentional. Clearly, they couldn't see the developments we have today, but some of those original framers were really paranoid about what a government could do, and may have thought a slow (or deadlocked) government is better than a fast, irrational one. Remember, "a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky and dangerous animals and you know it" [from the movie MIB]
In australia the government collects the taxes, which is distributed through to the states. The states are responsible for the running of the state, and can collect taxes on state based services (such as plane tickets), the local council can collect money in it's own area (parking etc).
Which is also good in theory, but the clear traceability of funds you suggest make it too easy for you to tell what the politicians are doing, and therefore whom you shouldn't re-elect. The system we have now is biased toward the incumbent (I won't say rigged, because I don't believe it's that bad, but their are things we could do to improve it). The difficulty in tracing what gets spent where helps those in power. The flowing of funds back to the states for special projects (a.k.a. pork) also helps those in power.
There is a clear hirarcy of power, the national government sets all national laws, the state sets it's state based laws, the councils set thair own laws.
Which only goes to show: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
While your suggestion makes practical sense, you start to run into things like: Is it more efficient to have one set of regulations vs. 50 of them. The counter argument there is that the states seem to adopt each other's systems (look at how so many states - especially the Northeast - adopt California's vehicle emissions standards). In theory, this use of 50 different groups of regulators results in more experimentation, and you end up with better solutions.
I really don't mean to have a tinfoil hat on here. This is NOT an easy set of questions to answer and will cause great debate among people asked to design a "good" system.
VOIP technology is taking the cost of long-distance calling to zero; the main reason companies like Vonage can get away with charging as much as they do is that they're providing convenience to early adopters, and big long distance spenders use a lot of minutes of last-mile delivery (currently billed about 2 cents per minute in much of the US.)
Towns like getting money, and once they get a source of it they make sure to spend it irresponsibly, and California's current state budget problems mean that the state is keeping more money that was previously going to the cities, so they're looking around harder for any sources of catch and grouchier about anything they lose. But this source of money is toast.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Don't liberals want less government ? how do you reckon they are the ones asking for more taxes ?
I don't care if it's e-mail, telephone calls, etc. The mediums used on the Internet shouldn't be taxed.
The only thing that should be taxed is perhaps the ISP service price. Imagine simply having sales tax on the $30 or so you pay for Internet access itself.
But with the U.S. "wanting" over a half trillion dollars per year for defense purposes, they are going to try getting every penny they can.
When VoiP is taken care of, the next step will be stamps for e-mail.
Internet, computers, politics and Thai food are all just the same. If you don't know what you're dealing with, better keep your hands off...
Privacy is terrorism.
This isn't really about computer based services like Skype, they're pretty much just for nerds. Your (for example) mom is pretty unlikely to want anything to do with them.
This is about stand alone VoIP like Vonage, which your mom could use without even knowing it.
If/when they get IP to IP cross network VoIP going, the POTS may be doomed and local governments will just have to find something else to tax, like say internet access, unless WiMAX makes that almost impossible too.
Still, left or right, you pretty much have to admit they need to get some money from somewhere. I don't want volunteer police and well fires will put themselves out eventually I'd rather not have to wait.
Oh, and as long as an old fashion 10 digit number is involved you can tap Skype where it hits the POTS, luck has nothing to do with it.
Oh, so non-geeks won't use skype? From experience I can tell you you're wrong. It was actually my Dad (who's, for the most part, technology literate, compared to many people his age) who tipped me off to Skype. He's now sucessfully converted some of his friends, and uses it to call his cousin in Buenos Aries every week. Yep, just for geeks I'm sure...
Its probably more accurate to say that Skype (not Skype-out which communicates with phones) is of limited utility to the mass market. Most people talk to people via a regular phone. Now if your dad is talking to other people while sitting in front of a computer (and they are as well), that's great - but that is far far from the norm.
The idea of taxing VoIP is whimsical at best and utterly moronic at worst. The ILEC's already have charges (which are taxed) for exchange services between local carriers, and unless you're exclusive making an IP to IP call, you are charged as well for the exchange, and reguardless of how you connect to the internet, you still pay a levy/tax for that connection (copper, fiber, radio, etc.)
This is nothing more than an attempt to regulate the 'net and to give more money to an already bloated government.
Read the rest of this rant...
As long as in return for checking that box, I get fair value of goods and services, I have no problem purchasing those goods and services from the government instead of from Private Industry. In return for my 90% tax rate, I want the following (based on what people in Norway get for their 90% tax rate):
Free food, clothing, shelter at a basic level, with luxury items purchased in my remaining 10%.
Free computer, TV, Electricity and Phone
New Car every 5 years
1-Month Mediteranian Vacation for "Seasonal Affection Disorder" every February.
Government also provides for the common defense- by buying me a weapon and giving me a two-week vacation every 10 years to make sure I'm proficient with my weapon, along with one weekend a year in my local militia.
Free Universal Health Care, Single Payer, $5 copayment for any service or perscription
Give me all of that, and I'll have no problem paying 90% income taxes. I would HOPE that you would have no problem living in such a system either- but perhaps you conservatives are too stupid to figure out how to prosper when everything is handed to you?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.