Slashdot Mirror
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."
...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
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
News to me and to wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_10
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
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
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.
It's also World Mental Health Day. Indian politicians are challenging us to question their mental stability.
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.
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