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Richard Stallman Asks: Should Big Tech Be Taxed For Hurting Society? (stallman.org)
Richard Stallman weighed in Friday on what he calls "massive commercial surveillance of individuals," saying that the two camps arguing about it "both miss the point." First there's the trustbusters who want to break Big Tech companies into smaller firms too small to eliminate their competition or exert undue influences on regulators. Then there's those who urge carefully-calibrated regulations to ensure tech companies always act in a way that's good for society.
RMS writes: By arguing about whether to divide up the power that this data gives to businesses, or to regulate the use of it (perhaps nationalizing it), they miss the point that both alternatives destroy our privacy and give the state a perfect basis for repression.
The danger is to collect that data at all.
More generally, I think the idea of taxing companies for the magnitude of harm that they do (regardless of whether they broke any rules to do it) is a good one.
RMS writes: By arguing about whether to divide up the power that this data gives to businesses, or to regulate the use of it (perhaps nationalizing it), they miss the point that both alternatives destroy our privacy and give the state a perfect basis for repression.
The danger is to collect that data at all.
More generally, I think the idea of taxing companies for the magnitude of harm that they do (regardless of whether they broke any rules to do it) is a good one.
I agree, if people are harmed then some form of compensation should put in place. If a society is harmed that should be in the form of regulation and taxes.
But first you need to quantify and prove the harm.
But Some Surveillance Is Necessary
Only extremists talks in compromises!
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
They pay at least some tax like everyone else.
Except Stallman, who manages to dodge all his tax via non profits that fund his lifestyle.
Left wing loves big government and spying on people. Republicans are for us and the little man who represent individuals and the free market will take care of the problem.
You can't be a liberal yet support privacy? It just can't happen
Forget big tech, what about "Big Oil" Richard Stallman? We have a measurable affect on human health.
I have the absolute right to sniff and store any and all traffic on my network. It is our responsibility as a society to ensure that the data is accessible to anybody and everybody so that nobody can gain the advantage.
Since we don't pay for these services, because we are being sold, companies will just have to sell our data to even more people.
The fact is that this is nothing new. It's been going on as long as we've been humans. Longer, in fact. Living things exploit each other. That's nature. However, we spend so much time trying to tell ourselves we are not animals because of our pride, we lose the free will to move beyond it. Technology just makes it easier to be horrible is all. We'd continue to be horrible without it.
So what's the solution? Not a clue. But obviously we haven't come close to finding it yet.
The next 5 months are going to be endlessly full of ads telling how big sugar is hurting society... and taxation is the answer.
Great original thinking, RMS.
It's often required for the purpose the individual thing serves. The issue comes from sharing data - be it to other products by a large corporation, the government, for separate revenue streams like advertising, or to other corporations/entities. Lots of sites NEED to collect user data (e.g. usernames, emails, etc) but they only collect excessive quantities of data when they intend to share it.
how much harm they have done? Charging companies for externalities is hard enough when they are relatively easy to measure and he wants to charge them for loss of privacy? I am a big privacy advocate, but no one is forcing you to use Google or Facebook. There are plenty of tools out there to block ads and the trackers they rely on when you visit other sites. The only thing you can't easily protect yourself from is your ISP. Even with SSL they see every IP address you visit. Using Tor or a VPN service to hide activity from your ISP substantially degrades performance. ISPs should be regulated imo, but if you don't want to give up your privacy then don't use Facebook. Use duckduckgo instead of google. No one is forcing you to visit these sites.
Now that he's old and will be dead soon, he wants everyone taxed.
Who's paying for these taxes? Why YOU, of course, tech employee! You will pay, in the form of less benefits and salary reduction.
What I mean by that is demanding more laws doesn't make any difference and is in itself as wrong as those bug companies that utilize government to do there bidding (like enforcing copy"right" or redistributing wealth via violence and government specifically to companies via schemes that force everybody to buy health insurance-or face theft by government directly). The solution to government oppression is eliminating government not trying to make things more "fair" or private. If you don't want to use Facebook don't use Facebook. I don't. If you don't want to use Skype don't use Skype. If people really don't like these companies amassing there data then they should vote with there dollars and eyeballs and stop making these entities profitable.
We can barely manage to fine/punish/even detetc the traditional non-tech companies who push the limits of regulation, screw over customers, manipulate our amateur politicians. What are the chances we're going to be able to outsmart and tax tech companies correctly?
What happened to reasonable prices and instilling a bit of curiosity into the kids?
Way over simplified and incorrect. What is found in nature is a lot of kin selection (helping those related to you to increase your fitness) and zoological altruism (helping each other and reciprocation is more beneficial than selfishness). These two things create the most benefit to the group. Yes, selfish individuals can game the system a little and create a SMALL advantage for themselves, but overall there is greater benefit to the average individual for not being selfish.
If you think the system is rigged in human society, then you really aren't paying attention to who you're voting for in not-so-corrupt democracies.
Say it with me, hard-working, successful people: "FUCK YOU, POORS!"
Now, I'm going to get in my environment-saving Tesla, and take a nice drive out to the ocean. Losers are LOSERS.
Better thing to do would be to fine the politicians that allow the loopholes in the law by which "legal" tax evasion becomes possible...
I got the idea from someone's Slashdot sig maybe around 2002 or so saying something like, "if it is intellectual property, shouldn't it be taxed"?
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
What is the social justification for such a tax?
Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.
Copyrights were originally monopolies granted "for a limited time" with the notion that the costs they imposed on society would be repaid by the work moving into the public domain after that limited time. That bargain has effectively been broken because the terms are so long (and likely will be in perpetuity in the U.S.A. given the recent Supreme Court decision). Yet, copyrights still pose a cost on society. There must be courts to dispute them, police to enforce them. There must be prisons to hold the millions of copyright offenders. Like no one in the 1960s would imagine a million U.S. citizens behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s, it is possible that there may be a million U.S. citizens behind bars in the 2010s for copyright violations as the "War on Those Who Share" gets underway. There must be an information superhighway to transport these works, and standards for disseminating them. Authors of derivative works must spend time researching whether a work is already in the public domain, or locating all the related rights holders if it is not. Extensions of the principle of copyright to cover the ideas in the work such as characters or plot lines or other structures make it ever more costly to create new non-infringing works. Many new or derived works are not created because of these chilling effects, which is a hidden cost of copyrights. People in developing nations or others who cannot pay use fees for copyrighted works are deprived of education or enjoyment when such a deprivation does not directly benefit anyone. So, given all these indirect costs of granting copyright monopolies, society is justified in imposing a financial cost on copyright holders to rebalance the copyright bargain.
Real estate is typically taxed at a small percentage of an assessed value. If the taxes are not paid, the real estate essentially becomes owned by society. Note that these annual property taxes are in addition to any fees for recording deed transfers, liens, title searches, and such.
Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax payments.
This approach could include a digital archive of all copyrighted works. Essentially, upon initial registration of a self-assessed value, a rights holder would be required to send in a digital copy of the work. This copy would be used to determine rights holders for works by means of a digital search. Any work not in this database would be presumed public domain. If the annual tax were not paid, th
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Yes.. society at large is constantly lowering the bar of acceptable behavior and responsibility. At the same time TV/Radio/Internet/world+dog foams at the mouth waiting for the next miscreant that has no regard for human life or even animal life... to appear and wrought their hate upon their unsuspecting victims. The media tends to publicize instead of demonize the evil that was smite against their victims for the sole sake of ratings.
We need to find an end to the "15 minutes of fame" for anyone that bestows a legacy of evil/hate upon the rest of us. Sadly the liberal-focused media in America won't do that because it suppresses their sound-byte video-byte media hype focus =(
Meanwhile you are no better than the ones you hate so much
Greed should be honored. Where society eoulf be without Gates and his planet (Mars) where he'll return after Earth collapse.
That always works! Let's not punish companies and individuals based on laws that are agreed upon in a public forum, let's let the government decide piecemeal who gets to be punished and for what. Define tyranny, Mr. Stallman...
at all.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
the IRS should be abolished and a flat tax with a graph that gets steeper as the more money someone or some corporation makes the more percentage of it goes to taxes, no tax shelters and no tax exemptions for religion, especially rich TV preachers and other wacky religious schemes that are just a front to fleece the ignorant they should be taxed the most, start at just 5% for the poor and the scale gradually inclines upwards to 10% once someone makes enough money to live at a certain level above the cost of living, and the incline gets steeper the more money in acquired, basically dont be cruel and burdensome to the poor and quit coddling the rich
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It's the values of greed and narcissism replacing hard work and intellectual prowess in our society, as sold to you by people like Donald Trump. Me me me, I'm important, take all I can get and fuck you.
Maybe I am missing something, but I think if people are upset by big tech companies then do not use, support, recommend anything they do, and spend time and advocacy putting together user-supported alternative networks with strong ethical guidelines, be it for software design, social networks, cloud services, or whatever else.
Of course, given the general gelatinous and complacent apathy that's been afflicting the masses as of late, this doesn't have much of a chance of happening.
But given the tools we have at our disposal, it feels sort of shameful that very few people are even trying to develop alternatives. Even so, at the very least it should be mentioned.
Anyway, this tax idea here? Feels like it isn't really going to accomplish anything whatsoever, it's fundamentally utopian in nature.
Why doesn't he ever talk about how he made slave labour more acceptable in software development?
More taxes to fund a repressive government? RMS is an idiot.
Everyone has greed. It's not an admirable quality it's just something we all have.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!
I gotta read that that again:
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!
Obviously, a corporatist pretending that government isn't for the corporations. Bush junior and Trump have gutted the regulations of several corporate watchdogs; regulations are easily changed and won't save you. That dysfunctional money-pit called US congress won't legislate fewer freedoms for the rich. Begging for 'good behaviour' from the political arena is the wrong choice.
The danger is to collect that data at all.
Which is why we need to protest the government introduction of facial-recognition technology, now. It's too late for the UK, USA and China but the rest of us need to be vocal now.
Not many people think it's ok to murder innocents. I think you need to rephrase the question.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
His idea of a perfect world is one in which taxpayers pay him to write code, and there are no private companies to hire his friends away for bigger salaries than they can get at MIT.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Greed is a very admirable quality when it leads to you being warm and well fed and alive. People in the West are spoiled beyond their imagination to cope with reality.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I capitalist America citizens are taxed for hurting corporate society. #MAGA
What are the SI units that we should use to measure the "magnitude of harm"?
Greed is a very admirable quality...
Is it still admirable when it makes you search the streets for used lottery tickets (just in case there's a winner) and eat 5 times as a regular human, stealing food from other people plates if needed and eating IT closet spare parts?
You can always count on left-leaning "progressives" to come up with another excuse to steal money from one person (probably a reasonably responsible and productive generally well-behaved person) and give it to another person (usually an incompetent, lazy, dysfunctional, malevolent, or self-medicating person). These megalomaniacal kleptocratic types also suffer from delusions of grandeur that they are somehow qualified to use the power of government and its ability to commit armed robbery to "tax" society into a utopia of their own personal design.
Who says that Stallman is right in his views of the proper role of tech in society?
Who says that Stallman is right in his views of whether society is currently good or bad?
Who says that Stallman is right in his views of which manipulations should be made to society?
Who says that Stallman is right in his views of the consequences of the policy changes he suggests?
The arrogance of the man is astonishing.
USA also needs to BAN Robot cars & trucks because once you replace all jobs with robots - what do you do with several of millions of surplus humans
These "surplus humans" have their time and energy freed to perform tasks better suited for humans. Solving more pressing issues than getting shit from point A to point B.
I see my shadow changing, stretching up and over me...
He better stop writing checks that he can't cash, due first to the limited amount of money in the world, and then to the more limited portion of it under his control. Hi I'm Emacs, I'm not going to write to the file you called me on, I'm going to replace it. What a garbage coder and a garbage human. "Hi, I'm RMS I want open hardware and think my code is the best possible so I'm going to release my software free with the provision that you have to release changes to get you to implicitly document (open) your hardware that you want to use my code with, but I'm totally going to pretend that I am about free software until people want to use it in a way that doesn't provide me value", "Most of the contributions to the Gnu project are because of it's use with Linux, but I'm going to insist you call it GNU/Linux so that I will maybe stay relevant, oh and that's a new freedom software should have, the freedom to have me rename your software whatever name my sick brain comes up with"
Laughed at.
LOL at the best the company hired for their skills to do security that big governments collect on:
The very best who could not imagine, protect against, discover, detect, speak out.
Government spies deep in secure networks gathering all data for years who went totally undetected by the top "experts".
Staff without the education to understand "someone" was getting to all the brands data.
Why where they hired on merit if outside gov networks could just export plain text data everyday from big brand secure internal networks?
In house legal teams happy to sign over their brands privacy obligations covering domestic users to give all data to big government.
Other agencies without domestic law enforcement ability doing full collection on US citizens for decades.
Big brands creating and supporting junk encryption so collect it all would be more easy for big government.
Laugh at the universities who graduate the crypto experts who pass that kind of crypto junk as the best their generation can develop and support.
Laugh at the professors who teach university level cryptography to that low standard and who have no idea what big government can do.
Laugh at the very smartest corporate network experts working for big brands who totally fail to notice that law enforcement network extracting all their plain text data in real time for years.
LOL at the peer review and out side code experts who glance over big brand code and give it their full "academic" "expert" approval.
LOL at the experts who go to crypto conferences and say nothing about weaknesses in junk crypto big brands push onto consumer systems.
LOL at the AV experts who did not support the few brands of good AV products that find and detect government malware.
A tax can be paid and a big brand will just see that at part of doing business.
LOL at the diploma mills that churn out computer "experts" with top qualifications who are lazy, always incompetent, a big government collaborator, a supporter of junk crypto and support junk standards.
Too busy to secure a network?
Too lazy to secure a network?
Dont have the skills to secure a network?
Had to support a government collecting for decades?
The math was too hard so the security had to wait a few years?
Creating junk crypto and have it trusted by generations of consumers was? Fun? A math puzzle that no other crypto expert worked out? A company joke for decades over every code review and product line?
Starting your own brand? Working for a brand thats supportive of your users?
Think about who you accept as a new "expert" and what their last "jobs" really resulted in. Their only real "skill" might be in breaking your new product so big governments can spy on everyone.
Hire a better expert who can code. Who can secure a network. Try not to LOL at the big failed brands listed on resumes.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
is another man's printing press
In a way that won't be abused to further OTHER forms of oppression, or isn't easily circumvented through legal or linquistic trickery.
Sure, everyone knows what harm FEELS like, but actually defining it for a legal framework is dangerous in the extreme.
Mainly due to all the special interests and the various axes they have to grind...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
We're wading into Asimov's zeroth law territory.
Who monitors and determines what is harm? It can't be the people; too many of them are clueless and most are too self-interested and f*ck anyone else. It can't be business; they've proven over and over that their only interest is self-interest and the bottom line, and f*ck the people, the environment and the planet. It can't be government; too much of that is driven or controlled by evil or stupid people; they've proven over generations that their primary interest is maintaining their own power and fortunes at most any cost, including the lives of the proletariat and well-being of the planet.
Who will be humanity's R. Giskard Reventlov and R. Daneel Olivaw?
Yeah but, have you ever heard the phrase "too many cooks in the kitchen" before?
I'm sure it applies to lots of things...kinda like single thread vs multi threaded. This is a technology site right? We like to eat? We can't all work at Amazon, or else we would be clocking in to pick up our own stuff. And then Amazon will stop paying us.
No.
Go back under your rock.
We need to tax Richard Stallman for wasting our collective oxygen.
Inventing GNU was a good contribution to civilization. For that Stallman deserves legitimate credit.
But ever since then all he's done is spout banal pronouncements about politics and economics (which he knows virtually nothing about).
Thankfully, in the real world (outside the FOSS bubble), nobody knows who Stallman is, let alone cares about his political opinions.
I keep hearing people say that, but it's kinda bullshit. Maybe YOUR friends and family are rich and spoiled. Well I come from a poor background, that I was lucky enough to escape. I've been all around the world. Yes, there are indeed some almighty shitholes out there. But most global poverty is not particularly worse than American poverty.
The idea that America is just sooooo damned rich is total horseshit. Nothing but domestic propaganda. Huge parts of America are desperately poor, and there's lots of really nice areas in so-called "third world" countries.
Gotta keep our poor folks thinking they're different than all the other poor folks in the world. Last thing the big money interests want is American workers developing a sense of global solidarity.
It helps if you actually know real facts. Amazons retail business barely breaks even, it certainly isn't making billions in profit, which is why Amazon pays practically zero federal tax and has only recently been in the black. Where Amazon actually makes money is areas like AWS, which surprisingly isn't where they actually mine peoples information.
Also while amazon is currently king on internet retail, they sell a fraction of what Walmart does a day, so your stores going out of business probably have little if anything to do with Amazon.
So what happens when government in it attempt to tax harm actually causes harm? How do we remedy that? A new law to fix the old law that may even cause more harm? An example; there is an alternative minimum tax in the US. It was passed in order to guarantee the very rich paid what was considered a âoefairâ amount of tax since other tax law gave them exemptions the regular folks couldnâ(TM)t take. Originally, in 1969, the government realized 155 citizens with high 6 figure incomes paid no tax because of all the deductions given them by the tax code. So congress passed the AMT to get them. The problem was it was never indexed for inflation. So the law that was meant to catch 155 people now catches millions and youâ(TM)ll never know until you do your tax. The first year I earned over $45,000 I got hit with AMT. Iâ(TM)d never heard of it before. Millions of middle class folks hadnâ(TM)t either. So a law to catch the wealthy had huge unintended consequences, except for the government that took more of your income. And, every so often they âoefixâ AMT again. So a law to fix the tax income law to catch people who pay no income tax actually harms millions of people. We should definitely put the government in the job of assessing harm.
As expected, the fifty cent army is out in force for this one! I guess this proposal, coming from a renowned defender of liberty like St Richard, must have Facebook & Google really spooked.
Watch the shills make all sorts of disingenuous arguments. Especially amusing is when they ape libertarian arguments, in defense of actions that trample liberty. And watch the foul mouthed forum disruption trolls as they hurl childish insults, in a flatulent effort to drive down the level of conversation.
St Richard, keep up the good work. The people are with you.
It's not admirable any more than having a foot is. It's just normal.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Your Associate's in Computer Engineering Technology was not a promise of instant wealth, who'd've thought that?
About 15 years ago rms and I actually exchanged some email. I dared to suggest that financial models actually mattered. On one hand, he convinced me that he could not care less about money, but on the other hand he did ask a rather insightful question that contributed quite a bit to my ideas for the Charity Share Brokerage. Doesn't exist yet, but among other applications it could help improve Slashdot and provide alternative funding for better journalism. Don't hold your breath, eh?
As regards his latest comments, he's about 1/3 of the way to reality now. I really think the reason he can't make more progress is because he has such a weak grasp of what freedom actually means. Corporate taxation certainly should consider harms, but the most important harm is obviously the destruction of freedom.
In phase one, the cure involves getting the soulless corporations out of politics. They need to stop bribing the cheapest politicians to help maximize their profits. Fake problem because there is NO solution. No amount of money will satisfy the problem of insufficient profit.
In phase two, taxation should be used to increase freedom. I think the most promising solution approach would be progressive taxes on corporate taxes based on market share. The goal is to make sure that every market has enough players to offer real choice. (Cf my sig.) It is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an inducement to reproduce by fission so excessively successful corporation becomes at least two competing corporations.
Caveat: There sometimes are natural monopolies that are going to wind up with overwhelming market shares. In such cases the higher tax rates are justified by (1) The cost of carefully regulating to monopoly to prevent abuse of the monopoly position, and (2) Research and even investment into ways to break the monopoly. If you can provide an example of a natural monopoly that lasted more than 50 years, please share it, because I know of none such, though I know of many examples of monopolies, natural and unnatural, that tried really hard to protect themselves as long as possible.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I'm a dolphin, you insensitive clod!
Die shareblue traitor! Die in a fuckjng fire!
I'm shocked that a leftist is for more taxes. Wow.
There's no objective measure of how much harm companies do by trading on your privacy. Who is RMS going to appoint to make the arbitrary decision, and who's going to pay him off to make the whole scheme pointless? Or more pointless than it already is?
It's ok, I still admire you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
every time this toe nail chewing idiot comes out with some ill informed pronouncement I just cringe the world is not black and white, and often the law of unintended consequences will bite you in the arse...
On a related topic I wish this guy would retire, on balance he's probably done more harm than good for the open source movement
Hello? Wars, colonialism, invasions, slavery? Lots to pick from, and not really about the mythical "natural selection", but more organized than that (companies).
Should politicians be taxed for hurting society? Yes....
My answer to the question? HELL, YES!
Should Walmart be taxed for forcing small shops out of business and creating a race to the bottom of low priced merchandise?
No need to quantify the harm in order to calculate a "tax".
Just fine the crap out of the companies for collecting data.
The problem is limited liability for the executives that run corporations. Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (banks, drug companies, MPAA, RIAA) are not evil. The executives that make decisions that cost people their lives and livelihood are. We are anthropomorphising human traits upon non-human entities.
The solution is to stop allowing executives to hide behind corporate liability, and put them in prison where they belong.
Should Stallman be taxed for hurting the world by his stupidity and continuous barrage of it upon our senses?
Growing up I had a tiny library of a few dozen books at home. I read these hundreds of times. My town library offered access to a few thousand more non-fiction titles, and by the time I moved away I'd read roughly a fifth of them. I always wanted to learn more, and was continually limited by the books I could find. Now some evil tech giant comes along and provides access to more data than I can consume in a dozen lifetimes.
You want to punish them for that? I want to give them a medal.
I live in the third world, and the first world is the cause of all my problems. SHUT UP PAY ME.
How about taxing his legion of trolls?
aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
True. In Czech republic they drive the wages low as shit but the prices mostly correspond to it so no big deal except if you want western gods I mean goods.
Be honest. If you have the free time to post on slashdot and luxury of internet access, you are fucking rich compared to half the world.
You are not regularly digging a hole with a wooden stick as a pick axe for water to drink. If you see bugs or snails and don't try to catch and eat them, you are not in desperate straights compare to the bottom ten percent in the world who see that as a source of edible protein. I'm not talking about butter soaked French restaurant snails, or chocolate dipped ants you heard about as an Ethiopian delicacy (hint it's the chocolate, not the ant).
If you don't always check the package and don't buy the one that is cheapest per calorie, you are not starving compared to hundreds of millions.
At the same time, if you don't already have both an account and a separate tax lawyer on speed dial (preferably your secretaries speed dial), you are going to get reamed by the new regime.