UN To Debate Taxing Internet Data

Wowsers writes "In an effort to get ever more taxes for doing absolutely nothing, the United Nations will consider a European proposal to tax the internet based on data that gets sent. The proposal is designed to get money from large bandwidth users like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix. Smaller companies that have high bandwidth requirements could be forced off the internet due to the taxes. 'The sender-pays framework would likely prompt U.S.-based Internet services to reject connections from users in developing countries, who would become unaffordably expensive to communicate with, predicts Robert Pepper, Cisco's vice president for global technology policy.'"

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If the tax were at a very low rate (say a 1/10 penny per megabyte) it wouldn't affect most users much. Suppose though that you taxed email at 1 cent per addressee? That wouldn't affect normal users much but would cost junk emailers enough that many untargeted junk emails would be stopped. But administering a monitoring and collection system for internet usage taxes would be expensive. I don't think I wanted the government in the middle of every transaction.