Indian ISPs Taxed for Generating "Light Energy"

CaptKeen writes, "The Hindu is reporting that the Indian Government is trying to tax optical broadband providers (think fiber to the premises) for generating 'light energy.' According to the Commercial Tax Department, optical broadband providers operate on light energy which is 'artificially created and sold to customers for the purpose of data transmission and information.' This classification would make Internet access goods (since you are buying light) as opposed to service — and would be subject to a 12.5% VAT."

Comments

Re:100 phothons please

[dgatwood]

The amount of light generated by the customer should be equal to the amount being generated by the other end, unless you send a significantly disproportionalte number of 1 bits versus 0 bits. See Manchester Encoding.

The money changes hands in exchange for actually routing the data back and forth, not for providing the light. Where the light is concerned, you have a like-for-like (light-for-light?) exchange between two parties with no financial transaction involved. So basically, the companies should simply tell the government that the two parties performed a like-for-like exchange of equivalent amounts of light, and that no additional money changed hands as a result of any inequality in the number of zero (high) bits. Therefore, since 15% of zero is zero, no tax is owed. Problem solved.