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Possible Taxes For Broadband Users
Morganis101 writes "CNET News reports that some broadband users might have to endure new universal service taxes. From the article: 'The suggestions came as lawmakers started debating changes to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which created the framework for the Universal Service Fund. The USF should continue to be industry funded, but the base of contributors should be expanded to all providers of two-way communications, regardless of technology used, to ensure competitive neutrality, a bipartisan coalition of rural legislators said in a June 28 letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, which will be drafting the rewrites. That means companies providing broadband services such as VoIP over telephone wires would also have to pay into the fund.'"
Would welcome this with some skepticism and hope that the revenues from such a tax might go to benefit the online community (less Spam, Phishers, Identity thieves, etc). Then I remember, U.S. government, War in Iraq....*sigh* pardon me for being so naive...
...in bed
I never could have anticipated this.
Anyone else notice all the 'future speak' in the article? Should, might, will, suggest? Politicians are fluent in the conditional tounge. I wouldn't worry about it.
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Why should the richest people in America pay taxes, when they can just hire "personal Websters" to surf the Net for them, and pay their taxes out of their minimum wages? Or just save that extra markup by outsourcing the Internet work to India? All the government does is stop rich people from making money. Why should they pay for it, when they can pay much less in campaign bribes^Wcontributions, to keep the little people in line, at their own expense?
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make install -not war
We already got a telephone tax to fund the Spanish-American War (1898). I wouldn't be surprised if we have a broadband tax to fund the Iraqi-American War, too.
At what point does the government need money from me because I'm on a privately run network? The internet is not owned or operated or maintained by any nation, so I don't see why we should pay taxes. (exceptions of course being things like govt. websites, but they are a different case)
I have to dl even more stuff just to get my $100 worth of cable fees!
Now that cable broadband is officially an info service, not a telecom service, its providers don't have to pay taxes. So of course its users have to pay taxes, or Congress won't be able to pass itself pay raises. The money's gotta come from somewhere - and it ain't comin' from campaign bribes^Wcontributions. That money is mostly spent on ads, run by cable companies.
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make install -not war
It's interesting timing that just this week the Supreme Court ruled for the FCC when they ruled that cable modems are not "telecommunications services, " but rather "information services." Might that exempt them from any proposed taxes?
How can something the government does not provide, aid, or own be taxed? If these taxes go towards better service, faster connections or hell, even free broadband for underpriveledged areas then I see no problem. If this tax goes towards anything other than the service that is BEING taxed then maybe its time for a tea party.
--George Orwell's Wartime Diary, 1940
...that I'm using my neighbors WiFi network.
Network name: Linksys
No wep key...
Woo hoo! No cable fees for soft_guy!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Surely if they ever were going to introduce taxes, they could introduce a proportional tax, linked to the network connection speed, and apply it across the board. Someone on a 14.4 connection might get a fraction of a cent tax on their connection, while someone on more bandwidth than they know what to do with will be taxed accordingly.
If it was possible to ensure that these taxes would be reinvested back into improving infrastructure and subsidising broadband rollout it could be palatable for American users. Essentially the early adopters / massive bandwidth capacity users subsidise the efforts to bring more users up to their standard of connectivity.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
"Bipartisan," I love that term. It basically means that tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum decided to conspire together on some new scheme so you have no way of opposing it.
Liberty in your lifetime
You think they don't? The only difference between your phone/internet bill is that they let you know exactly how much the taxes are costing you. Like you said, taxes are a cost of doing business. Like any other cost of business you need to balance your prices to take them into account. If McDonalds suddenly had to start paying a 50 cent "junk food tax" on each burger sold, you know the price of Happy Meals would go up at least 50 cents (because there's also the administrative overhead of dealing with the new tax).
It leads to very deceptive advertising which can't be good for the consumer. Comcast and T-Mobile need to pay those taxes themselves and put sticker prices up to compensate.
Yes, the governments would love that. Hidden taxes are the best kind, bceause no one ever really notices how much they're paying. A tax increase rolled into your monthly rate would just be blamed on "those damn greedy cable companies raising rates again", while a brand new $5 "information services tax" on your bill would let you know exactly who's sucking more money from your pocket. They hate what the tel/cable compaines do, because you can see just how badly your local jurisdiction is screwing you.
Just goes to show you that when our "elected representatives" look at us, the electorate, all they see are pockets to be picked. Whose idea was it to concentrate all that power in the hands of the very few, anyways?
I already pay 7.65% for FICA (ie, Social Security), but were I to run my own business and turn a profit, I would have to pay double that, since I would be both employee and employer. Of the money I get after FICA, state and federal income taxes, and state mandated unemployment insurance, I then get charged 8.25% in sales taxes, surcharges and strange fees for my electric, water, gas, and telephone bills (including that 3% tax left over from the Spanish American war, which was well over a century ago), and twice a year, I have to fork over money to the local county for the privilege of owning tangible property.
And for this I get: roads that still need fixing, bribery and corruption scandals that cost taxpayers money, ever-increasingly complex laws that require you to have a law degree just for self-defense, school districts that wail and complain that they need bond money, but then turn around and spend the money building shopping plazas on top of abandoned oil fields, leading to the project being declared unusable, and of course, the innumerable tax breaks and pork-barrel projects doled out by our collective congresscritters to keep their districts happy at the expense of the rest of the United States.
It's a pity that elections couldn't take place in late April, say a week after tax day. Oh well, I might as well start working on my taxes for NEXT year...
(sub)Urban America deserves subsidies from the rural folks to help offset the astronomical prices of land that we pay. Land in rural areas is as cheap as $2000/ acre vs $100000+ / acre in the suburbs alone. They can pay me my my share out of the USF until that runs out next week. We can work out a deal for the rest; maybe start with some loose country girls.
I just realized - that guy has a national presence!!!
The Raven
I'm not one to bitch about the editing here, but this title really ought to have read: Possible Taxes for US Broadband Users.
That having been said, the purpose of the USF was (is) to ensure that telecom companies extend coverage to sparsely populated areas rather than just staying in cities where they get far more uses per kilometer of cable, right?
They can try to wrap this with libraries and schools, but those entities are funded through local and state governments. As far as healthcare goes, it seems the only thing the US government is interested in funding is marble paneling for the lobbies of Eli-Lily and Phizer.
I guess my question is, how much new cable is actually being laid in rural America? Aren't the telcos much more focused on putting up cell towers and selling much more profitable wireless plans?
What exactly is a provider of two-way communication? Does that mean that every web-site has to pay (since an http request and response is two-way)? Would it mean that Slashdot gets taxed but Drudge Report doesn't, because users can communicate with each other through the former?
What about Skype? Does it mean I'll start getting a monthly bill for $0.00 (10.2 percent of what I pay) from Skype to cover this?
What if, as a previous poster noted, I set up an asterisk box and route all my calls through a number in the UK, or Canada, etc? What if I start selling Canadian numbers here in Washington DC but my company is legally seated in the Caymans?
All of that aside, this is just a letter sent to a Congressional committee, not a law and not even a bill. It was signed by 60 of 435 Reps, mostly so they can go home to their constituents and talk about how they are fighting that damned bureaucratic machine in Washington to win rights for rural America.
It's also quite likely that none of the signatories actually want or expect this to go anywhere, because if it did they would have to explain in the next election why they made grandma pay taxes for her AOL account.
Rest assured, this is going nowhere.
Some examples of what this tax has funded: It Puerto Rico, it was supposed to be used to wire 1,500 of Puerto Rico's schools for the Internet. In 2001, only nine schools had been wired. Auditors also found nearly $23 million in equipment that had never been installed in [Puerto Rican] schools, along with $3 million per month spent on high-speed Internet connections in schools that didn't even have PCs. In Chicago, about $8 million worth of equipment provided by SBC was never deployed in the city's public schools.
It doesn't? When does the advertised price ever include tax? Have you ever walked into a store and paid exactly what the price tag said? While some things like clothes and food aren't taxed in many jurisidctions, in most cases you're paying a sales and/or service tax to at least one jurisdiction (and sometimes two or three are taking a cut) every time you step up to a cash register. The company is only charging you X dollars. The government happens to be charging you more, which is entirely out of their control.
I had a similar conversation with a comcast rep that called me. Their service is very slightly cheaper (at face value) than my current ISP, but my ISP charge me the EXACT amount that they advertise, when i know that my comcast bill is bound to be higher.
Your current (dialup, I assume) ISP is only required to collect from you, at most, sales tax. Comcast is under a lot of regulatory and taxation umbrellas. They're required to collect all those taxes from you, despite their pricing being the same as your dialup ISPs. How is that their fault? You're blaming the wrong guy here. Despite you paying X dollars, Comcast is only getting Y dollars from you, just as your ISP would only be getting Y dollars. Even though you know Comcast is only seeing the same amount of money as your ISP in the end, it's still hard for you to come to terms with the fact that they're not gouging you in some way because more money is coming from your pocket when you get Comcast service. Imagine how difficult it would be to explain this concept if Comcast wasn't even allowed to disclose what effect taxation had on your bill. You'd really think they were screwing you. And that's exactly how taxing authorities like it.
Including taxes in the price won't actually increase the cost - it'll only bring the actual cost inline wiht the advertised price.
Yes, it would. Taxes would creep up faster, as it would be easier to hide small increases over time. Look at Europe and the VAT. They're required to price items with the VAT already included and retail taxation is absolutely out of control, with VAT ranging from 15-25% across the EU.
Dammit -- we do not need more taxes! ESPECIALLY on communication services and ESPECIALLY when every U.S. citizen with a telephone is still paying the Spanish-American war temporary tax from 1898
We do not need more taxes. We need a more efficient government.