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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."
I would gladly pay a small tax for super fast internet access...but the internet has to be free, no filtering, no censorship, no throttling, no blocking torrents ect. Information wants to be free, but there is no free lunch.
If paying a small tax will guarantee completely free, uncapped and non-filtered broadband with a certain reasonable speed guarantee, then yes! Otherwise, what's the point?
As we have seen time and again with the Universal Service Fund, big health care (Pfizer being let off the hook for defrauding Medicare because punishing them would mean delisting all of their products from Medicare) and big finance (if you cannot immediately think of five major scandals, you've not been paying attention) the big guys get government money and aren't held accountable at all. At all. So, no. Not a single red cent to them. I don't give a damn how high and noble their stated goals are. Until we have an independent prosecutor who can hang one of these companies from the nearest lamp post for taking the money and not doing precisely what the money is for, the answer is "no."
And if you let your idealism get in the way and say "yes," you're an idiot who deserves to have your face rubbed into this when you get betrayed.
Their experiment in being Wall St. with glaciers didn't work out so hot, though... (to their credit, however, they (relatively speaking) just washed their hands of the issue and told people to fuck off, rather than working on the theory that if we just pandered a little harder to the people who fucked up in the first place, they would deign to fix the problem...)