Slashdot Mirror
Would You Pay an Internet Broadband Tax?
An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Internet Tax Freedom Act? The whole point was to prevent the government from ever taxing the Internet. But that's the proposal from the FCC — and backed by companies like Google, AT&T and Sprint. Would you pay a buck or two extra for fast access — or vote for someone who thinks you should? 'If members of Congress understood that the FCC is contemplating a broadband tax, they'd sit up and take notice,' said Derek Turner, research director for Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that opposes the tax."
If it means universal service provisions for broadband internet access, then yes.
There are people in rural areas right now that don't have Internet access because telcos aren't willing to spend the money to run it out to them.
Universal service provisions allowed telephone service to reach every single person in the entire country back in the day. The same thing should happen for broadband internet access today.
Only if the money actually went to improving broadband access and speeds in America. The problem is that it just goes to the government coffers and is distributed, mostly, to Social Security.
If the money went to directly improving the system it taxed, then yes. I would love to see a tax that helped pay for a nation-wide fiber-optic system that replaced the aged copper system we rely on.
Unfortunately, it'll only go to lining the FCC board and chairman's pockets with money.
If that meant "we" owned the infrastructure, not the media companies. One requirement would HAVE to be net neutrality.
I would absolutely pay for an internet tax, as long as any service receiving aid from that government tax coffer was forced to provide network neutrality by law.
As it stands, what this is actually earmarked to pay for is probably the "lawful intercept" features that government want to add to everyone's internet.
Sure, let's all chip in a buck.
Maybe thirty cents goes into "administrative costs" (the inevitable bureaocracy)
Twenty cents, at least, will be sequestered for other failing programs.
Another forty will no doubt be pocketed by recipient telco shareholders and executives.
Perhaps five cents will go for surveys and studies.
Maybe, if we're lucky, a nickel will go toward the intended purpose.
And so it goes.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt earned a $16.4 Million salary last year.
I fail to see any innovation from my Internet provider.
He got paid 16.4 Million. I doubt he _earned_ that much money for any normal definition of the word.
It's called the Universal Access Fund. It's still on your telco bill.
Why would we need yet another tax on our bill just so we can give more money to people that have demonstrated they have absolutely no intention into expanding their offerings.
It's not like the bandwidth is not available. If you have cable, most likely you are already able to get 100/100 Mbps without much of an investment (maybe replace the modem). The fact that you don't have it is because the cable companies don't have any incentive to give you more than 10Mbps because they're the incumbent, they have been granted monopolies in most places and they will rather spend money fighting any competition than giving you more access for free.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Yep, as an European, I don't get why I should pay such a tax. I pay for my own broadband connection, and while I agree that everyone should have access to the Internet, it's already available for free at libraries that are funded by my taxes anyway. So I don't get the point of a general "broadband tax".
And this is why much of Europe is broke and and the EU is on the verge of breaking up. Of course, we American's are not doing much better. But the point is that our priorities are all out of whack. Everyone seems to want something for nothing. This attitude will not last the test of time.
Life is not for the lazy.
I am European, and I think that fast Internet for free should be available to anyone in EU, as part of basic human rights. I don't care how it is technically done, but this should be long-term goal, especially for social parties, in order to prevent new kind of illiteracy of poor people.
You cannot reasonably claim a Right to be given a service for free. As there is no such thing as anything for free, what you're really demanding is that the government use force of arms to take from one set of people and give to another.
And people wonder why the EU is falling apart financially....
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
And this is why much of Europe is broke and and the EU is on the verge of breaking up. Of course, we American's are not doing much better. But the point is that our priorities are all out of whack. Everyone seems to want something for nothing. This attitude will not last the test of time.
Funnily enough, that's not it.
The countries in Europe with the most expansive and expensive social welfare programmes are doing relatively well. It's the countries that followed the US financial model more closely (Greece and Ireland especially, and the UK somewhat) with an over-reliance on the financial sector as the next great engine of their economies and a tax system that ensured they were sitting on a bubble that eventually burst.
The countries that are now bailing them out are the ones with the high taxes and extensive welfare state provisions, like Germany, France and (again to a lesser extent, since we fucked up too), the UK.
It's not welfare programmes that bankrupted certain Eurozone countries, it was the financial policies at the other end of the scale - the banks, the toxic loans, the irresponsible tax policy, financial deregulation and the shedding of manufacturing and other things that previously kept the economy going. The welfare state is the reason that we don't have a social underclass who lost everything when the economy crashed and had some support until they were able to get back to work again without losing everything they owned.
You're also mistaken if you think "much of" Europe is broke.
Whether or not it's fascist doesn't matter because it violates the Constitution:
Article I, Section 7:
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.