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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."
it's gotta be a cheaper tax than that *heavy* energy...
That will be billed per photon then?
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
This sounds reasonable and ingenious.
...I generate "wind energy" several times a day, but I don't ask the Government to pay for it, do I.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
as I understand that 10/10 is the equivalent for them.
It's like the US government reclassifying tomato as a vegetable so it can impose the import tarif on it. Governments always look for ways how to tax the hell out of you. Nothing new here. Move along.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Let's put them all on a shuttle and send to them collect billions of years of back taxes from the sun.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
I used to work for a logistics company, and we dealt with 'light goods' all the time.
Oh.
When the British empire controlled India, they levied a small tax on the production of all salt in the country. It was not that the government made much by this tax, nor was it that the people were burdened by it. But india ran on salt, and by taxing it the British controlled it. It was for this reason that Gandhi lead a march to the sea to do the very simple thing of making salt in oppisition to british rule.
When I read that a government that was created by the power and witness of such acts now wished to tax the production and transmission of light, It makes me wonder if they have even read their history.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Yeah but the problem with electrons is that you aren't buying them. All you are doing is renting them. Once you have finished using them you send them back to the provider. So in that way photons *are* different.
I'm not sure of the Indian taxation system, but I would guess that a consumer is already paying the government for the privelage of getting electrons in the first place, which will then be used to turn the photons into useful information. This would smack of double taxation. But hey, the Australian government is happy doing this as we can pay government mandated GST on top of government mandated stamp duty.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'm curious as to whether or not this isn't an attempt by the Indian government to try and help re-distribute the wealth to a degree. My understanding is that there is a growing urban/rural conflict emerging as the elites in the major urban areas are growing wealther and wealthier due to outsourcing by wealthier nations to India and the rural areas continue to be rather impoverished. So the net impact on the populace is only going to be really hitting the urban areas and the new tax revenue could be used through-out the country. Not saying I like the idea of this tax, I'm just speculating on what could be the root idea behind it.
We are looking to find an algorythm which can compress data into as many 0's as possible. /dev/null and whilst this has the desired effect, we cannot rebuild the data at the other end.
We will pay handsomly for such an algorythm since our light bill will be substantially lowered.
Note, we have already tried piping the data through
In this case, the lights are off but we are home.
Incidentally, our engineers did try to come up with a novel way to transmit binary data using darkness alone.
We transmitted a zero as a single off state, and a one as a double off state, this saves electricity and light but our engineers are again having trouble reading it.
liqbase
This article is inducing some serious cognitive dissonance for me. I find this article seriously disturbing.
Taking the taxman's position in this article, one could impose the VAT on cellular telephone providers as they are doing the same thing, exhanging money for a specially encoded form of electromagnetic radiation. That's right - the only difference between visible light and radio waves is the frequency. You can not hold visible light in your hand just as you can not hold any EM waves.
And FM radio gives their radiation away for free...must be communists or something
"Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation." - Richard Feynman
One way around it-- they could switch to infrared LED's, then you're not getting visible light.
If they claim you're still getting heat, challenge them to feel the end of the fiber and detect any heat coming out.
It does make Ben Franklin, or was it Faraday, apropos to today. Back then he was showing some govt official batteries and electromagnets. The official asked "What good is it?" Reply: "Soemday, you'll tax it".
I wish you 100% success in your initiative to tax light energy from Indian ISPs
You will single handedly kill outsourcing to your country. Many American IT workers will deliver many thanks upon you
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
This sounds reasonable and ingenious.
Insidious, maybe. But "Buying Light" suggests it's only unidirectional, what's really happening is you're exchanging light, with a net of 0.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The fiberoptic light energy is a *free* service, available to anyone without charge.
However, if you would like the ISP to modulate some well-timed *dark* spots in the line for the purposes of data transmission, *that* is going to cost you.
Since darkness (the absence of light) can't be defined as a product, no VAT.
Problem solved.
In many countries you get money back if you can contribute to the grid. So, all I have to do is shine a light down the fibre, perhaps using the sun as a light source, and charge them! Somehow, I doubt they'll fall for this thou'.
What about a tax break for giving back some of the light with each packet sent? - you have requests 'going out', and for each packet you receive you send back some kind of ACK.
I am an Indian and I have no idea what the government is trying to achieve by this. India already has a tax on services, at 12%. How would changing the classification from goods to service help ? The tax revenue will be increasing by just 0.5%.
In any case, this is being done only by a state government, so its valid only within that particular state. It will have no effect on any other parts of the country. And I expect this to be struck down by the courts anyway.
Silly person, all lawyers are crazy. They're nowhere near "sound"! ;)
Which gives me an excellent idea, even if I say so myself.
What do you mean, "light energy"? Here, look at this plugged-in-at-the-other-end optical cable... can you see anything? Any light?
Look again, I'm sure you'll see it eventually...
Ignore this signature. By order.
This is one of innumerable instances where the bureaucracy (or an unbelievably numb part of it) will reclassify something at a whim and want to tax it. The motives are many - revenue to the exchequer, corruption, or just plain sadism.
You've got to meet some of these revenue officials to realize what absolute crud they are actually.
It should be clear to anybody having the slightest knowledge of business transactions and indirect taxation that the ISPs are not selling light energy, they are just providing data communication service. If we go by their logic, they would start levying VAT on the electrical charge in phone lines, microwaves for cellphones, radio waves, God knows what else.
And as the value of the 'goods' being sold is much higher than the input cost, namely electricity, the value added could be computed as a major chunk of the rental/data transmission charges unless allowed to be set off by connectivity expenses.
Oh well, not everyone in India has to worry about this, the tax is being assessed only in Karnataka, where Bangalore - and its most notorious, useless products are located. In a sense, it is moving forward quicker to the planned unification of VAT and Service Tax under GST. More power to you, o techie!
-clueless
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
Now, if you want to do the accounting properly, you should separate out the cost of the energy used in producing the light, as opposed to the cost of the information. So the wattage used to drive the transmission gear ought to be easy to measure, because that's the energy used to generate light. What percentage of the total electricity used by the ISP goes to the lasers, as opposed to the servers, routers, etc.? How much did they spend on electricity? How much is that as a percentage of the total price of the service?
If the stupid tax thugs want to cripple their economy through rent-seeking, make sure they only get the correct rent...
When I first started working with Indian businesses in the early 90s, my opinion was that the best thing anybody could do for the world economy was to ask their telecom regulation bureaucrats how much of a bribe it would take to get them to go away and leave everybody alone. A billion dollars? Pay it! Of course, nobody did that, but telecom did gradually get some partial liberalization, and the Bangalore call center business alone went from near-zero to a billion dollars, then two, then five billion a year, and I've lost track of its growth since then. There's still a lot of trouble - VSNL had a lock on the submarine cable landings, so there were terabits of traffic going by the harbor in Mumbai but only a few gigabits were allowed to land, and they were very expensive because of their scarcity and the toll they extracted for using the services, whereas other carriers can haul bandwidth around the country for costs (as opposed to prices) that resemble the costs in the EU or US. India may have economic development issues that make it a bit more expensive, but that's more like a factor of 2, not 10, and the cost of right-of-way for cable routes should probably be much lower, which makes up for some of it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So India will finally decide if a photon is a particle or a wave?
this is great! SCREW YOU EINSTEIN!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire