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FCC Panel Wants To Tax Internet-Using Businesses, Give the Money To ISPs (arstechnica.com)
The FCC's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC), which includes members like AT&T, Comcast, Google Fiber, Sprint, and other ISPs and industry representatives, is proposing a tax on websites to pay for rural broadband. Ars Technica reports: If adopted by states, the recommended tax would apply to subscription-based retail services that require Internet access, such as Netflix, and to advertising-supported services that use the Internet, such as Google and Facebook. The tax would also apply to any small- or medium-sized business that charges subscription fees for online services or uses online advertising. The tax would also apply to any provider of broadband access, such as cable or wireless operators. The collected money would go into state rural broadband deployment funds that would help bring faster Internet access to sparsely populated areas. Similar universal service fees are already assessed on landline phone service and mobile phone service nationwide. Those phone fees contribute to federal programs such as the FCC's Connect America Fund, which pays AT&T and other carriers to deploy broadband in rural areas.
The BDAC tax proposal is part of a "State Model Code for Accelerating Broadband Infrastructure Deployment and Investment." Once finalized by the BDAC, each state would have the option of adopting the code. An AT&T executive who is on the FCC advisory committee argued that the recommended tax should apply even more broadly, to any business that benefits financially from broadband access in any way. The committee ultimately adopted a slightly more narrow recommendation that would apply the tax to subscription services and advertising-supported services only. The BDAC model code doesn't need approval from FCC commissioners -- "it is adopted by the BDAC as a model code for the states to use, at their discretion," Ajit Pai's spokesperson told Ars. As for how big the proposed taxes would be, the model code says that states "shall determine the appropriate State Universal Service assessment methodology and rate consistent with federal law and FCC policy."
The BDAC tax proposal is part of a "State Model Code for Accelerating Broadband Infrastructure Deployment and Investment." Once finalized by the BDAC, each state would have the option of adopting the code. An AT&T executive who is on the FCC advisory committee argued that the recommended tax should apply even more broadly, to any business that benefits financially from broadband access in any way. The committee ultimately adopted a slightly more narrow recommendation that would apply the tax to subscription services and advertising-supported services only. The BDAC model code doesn't need approval from FCC commissioners -- "it is adopted by the BDAC as a model code for the states to use, at their discretion," Ajit Pai's spokesperson told Ars. As for how big the proposed taxes would be, the model code says that states "shall determine the appropriate State Universal Service assessment methodology and rate consistent with federal law and FCC policy."
We're letting *AT&T, Comcast, Google Fiber, Sprint, and other ISPs and industry representatives* write our tax code. I guess it's better than letting Enron, Exxon, and DuPont write them... Oh wait, they probably do
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Because you haven't given ISPs enough ways to screw the consumer and make money already? Unbelievable.
who tend to vote for them. Not that I mind rural communities getting the Internet, but not like this. Make it municipal broad bank. A country just did it for about $5 bucks a month. Verizon got billions of my money to build out rural fiber, kept the money and never did the work.
No more. Fund municipal broadband out of the General fund or tell the fuckers to fuck off. All this does is charge me $5 bucks a month (I pay for business class at home) for free money in AT&Ts hands.
Once again, we've got an election in 2 years. Show up at your primary and vote the fuckers out. Then show up at the general and put some real pro-consumer folks in. We had plenty of them in the primary in 2018 but so few showed up for the primary that most of these yahoo incumbents survived. Again, no more. Primary them and then vote in pro-worker and pro-consumer reps who refuse corporate PAC money.
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Since "Internet-using" companies already pay their ISPs for access and bandwidth, like everyone else does, perhaps the ISPs could take some their -- what do you call them, ah, yes -- enormous profits and use them to build rural infrastructure all on their own. Sure, perhaps the ROI / profits from that won't be enough to list under the "Rape and Pillage" section of the quarterly reports, but maybe people will hate ISPs a little less -- except, obviously, for Comcast. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
...we sue AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon for the $400 billion of public funding they already received for rural broadband and just pocketed and we can use that to provide rural broadband?
Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233 (1936). Minneapolis Star Tribune Company v. Commissioner, 460 U.S. 575 (1983). Government cannot tax speech activity. Newspaper taxes ruled unconstitutional. Ink taxes unconstitutional.
Government can only tax speech items with "generally applicable sales tax". An internet tax is 100% unconstitutional. End of discussion.
to make a new innovative network that's community broadband ISP aware.
Let a monopoly telco return with a network they 100% control and demand a town/city accepts that monopoly network they pay for?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Two things wrong with this plan.
You mentioned the first one: handing tax money to ISPs.
The second one:
We have far too many different taxes, and associated paperwork and bureaucracy, already. No need to invent a new type of tax. If we DID want to give taxpayer money to X, just write them a check and if that means increasing taxes, do it. Propose a 1% increase in the existing taxes to pay for it. We don't need 784 different taxes.
We had a discussion here on Slashdot about that last week.
Even before you see the top line of your paycheck, two taxes have been invisibly taken out of your pay, "paid by the company", they say, but it's part of the cost of employing you - really part of your pay. Then three more taxes come out that show up on your paycheck. As you take your paycheck to the bank, you're paying gas tax to drive your car, which you pay an annual tax on. Take the money out of the bank and spend it? Sales tax. Pay the mortgage with it? Property tax. Pay a doctor bill or buy something at Walgreens? Obamacare tax. The same money taxed over and over and over. Just tax our paychecks at 60% and get it over with already.
The word you want is 'penalty,' not tax, and those should have been baked into the language of those commitments if they are actually commitments and not just your standard marketing hot air.
it's like giving the gas tax to private toll roads and no they will not be made into free roads.
You're already paying the fuckers! CenturyLink is being paid $500 MILLION in tax money yearly for rural broadband expansion and they're only using it to cover areas that someone else covers already so they can stifle competition, completely ignoring unserved areas. The rationale behind municipal broadband bans is that it's unfair to compete with the government because they have tax authority, yet they gladly take tax money and use it to be anti-competitive. NO MORE TAX MONEY TO BIG ISPs!
They can't tax Internet use. It's literally against the law.
But don't let that stand in the way of FCC announcing to the country how totally, utterly and completely corrupt they are.
...in infrastructure projects like this one, right?
Well, you got net neutrality overturned. So go invest in that infrastructure now... Oh wait, you don't want to pay for it now. What's your lame-ass excuse now?
You lying, greedy, ******* bastards.
They're not going to get squat, but the GOP will get a photo op where they tell them they're gonna get Internet and the propaganda news outlets they watch will trumpet that. Then when the Internet never materializes they'll blame it on tax and spend liberals' job killing regulations.
Keep in mind I'm not necessarily blaming the Rural folks for falling for this crap. The big reason I want them to have internet is so they can stop watching cable and over air TV and get out of the propaganda bubble their in. I think it would be great for the country as a whole. Those communities have massive hospital shortages and problems with clean drinking water. The American left (think the Bernie wing of the Democratic party) wants to solve those problems, but they keep losing elections to rural voters (who, thanks to the Senate, Electoral college and gerrymandering have about 40x the voting power of a city voter) keep shooting down attempts to help them.
If we could somehow get the message to them about how much the GOP is screwing them over we could fix just about everything.
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There is also nothing at all that guarantees they'll actually DO the build-out, much less do it in rural areas that are unserved. Major carriers get literal billions from the government solely to build out service in unserved areas and they don't do it. Rather, they don't serve an area, a small competitor ISP starts dropping fiber in the ground in that area, and LIKE MAGIC, the big ISP that gets billions in tax dollars to build out to unserved areas has the funds and desire to build out to that area that's about to be served by the small competitor. But the ten houses two miles down the road and 2000 feet down a gravel driveway? Fuck 'em, the hillbillies, they don't get our tax-funded build-out that the government intended to be for them! These rural build-out agreements with telecoms clearly hold no teeth. The government is literally paying tax money to huge companies to keep small companies from competing with them.
...and the donkey he rode in on! Hopefully he'll be an add-on to the Trump impeachment proceedings.
I've reported posts just like this, but nothing happens. Sometimes they don't even get modded to -1.
I'd like Slashdot's editors and ownership to explain why they're tolerant of posts calling for people to be lynched. This is not protected free speech; it is illegal. Whipslash needs to explain himself about why these posts are tolerated.
as give away to rural communities. A rural voter has somewhere around 40x the voting power of a city voter thanks to our Senate, Electoral College and Gerrymandering. We need to get those folks to stop falling for this crap and get on the side of the rest of the working class.
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When I had a small business, every year I had to fill out forms to pay business personal property tax of less than $5. The state actually called me, somewhat angrily, about another tax that was less than a dollar.
How much do you think it cost the state to provide an office, computer, etc, and pay the person, to call people about a 87 cent tax? Plus the cost of the forms, my time filling out the forms, etc. It's just a compete waste.
It's worse, it's like suggesting Walmart should pay road tax because how else are their customers going to get to the store.
Apply to any business the benefits from broadband internet ? Does that apply to AT&T and Comcast as well as they are entirely dependent on the internet and broadband ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Once you start Taxing things, it doesn't stop and it won't ever go away.
I seem to have heard this somewhere before:
No taxation without representation...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
...which to be fair, is exactly what happens. The Highway Trust Fund hasn't covered its costs from Gas Taxes/etc for decades now, it's needed propping up from the general fund for a while. (And the HTF was always a bit of a con anyway, but that's a discussion for another time)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It is fascinating how difficult it is to be shocking these days. Even as recently as 2005, someone would have cared about these comments as much as you do. The most striking thing about them is that no matter how you stretch your lexicon and imagination, you can't conceive of anything that would upset people like before. Just another dry mouse fart in the roiling maelstrom of the largest repository of filth humanity has ever compiled. You have my pity. Or would, if I wasn't also an unfeeling half-person like everyone else here. Strange times.
Note, they are calling mobile internet rural broadband now, some of the most expensive bandwidth to purchase as a consumer.
We want to tax businesses to pay the wireless providers for their already lucrative business.
Seems like businesses don't want the hassle of creating a successful business, but would rather get subsidies from those who put in the effort.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Someone's Ajitating for a hurt real bad. Where are the Trump defenders?
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
They pay for their own bandwith.
It's the customers on these networks that GENERATE the requests for traffic.
It's not like these services are simply broadcasting into these networks.
Fucking retarded.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I love you people... each morning, I wake up and read Slashdot and love learning nifty new works like "Murican" and "Libtard" and "Lean-jig". If it weren't for Slashdot, I don't think I'd be able to keep my relationship to the U.S. strong. There's nothing as beautiful as people calling themselves Americans displaying their true American spirit by showing us what "United we stand" and "United States" and "With liberty and justice for all" etc... really mean.
... was it "Murican" way of defining a person who votes sometimes Democrat and sometimes Republican and sometimes independent. And when they vote, they vote based on the individual not on the party they belong to. And sometimes they vote simply to attempt to support the constitution and the spirit of the country by hoping to ensure that checks and balances remain in place? Is there a word for people who are neither liberal or conservative by instead are educated and actually care about the wellbeing and hopefully also the needs of as many American people as possible?
... let me borrow your term... libtards who oppose everything the current administration does. This is the same as how people like yourself probably disliked most everything Obama's administration attempted to do. People like you and them tend to believe there must be a team sport involved in politics. It is almost as if you have define yourself as a supporter of a team and whether you agree with the actions of your own team or not, it's more important that the other team loses face. As such, when a member of one team or another proposes something which could in fact be good for everyone, instead of working together to represent the overall best interests of everyone, each team attempts to sabotage the other's efforts. This is in fact the current systematic approach to American politics because nearly everyone today votes for
Tell me, what's the really cool
I suppose you would have a lovely word to describe people like us. It wouldn't be something simple like idiot or asshole... at least I hope it wouldn't. Maybe you have a suitable onomatopoeia or maybe a portmanteau?
Also... to let you know... while I voted for and supported Obama, I would voted for Bush if he opposed Clinton this time as I don't believe in Clinton and I believe Jeb would be little more than a puppet for the party like his brother and father before him. Though I would have voted for Sanders against pretty much any of the candidates this time around... even if I consider him a sellout for joining a party. And if I knew that "orange man" stood a chance of winning, I might have registered as republican just to help Romney get into place because I didn't think it was fair that republicans ended up being unrepresented in the last election. In fact, Romney has grown up a little since he ran for president and I think that if he would actually take a few classes on history and politics at a university and he did some night school and learned about the constitution and the actual scope of the office of the president, he would be a good president now.
I'm also at a loss over "sonoppose". I know a guy like you, he was trying to be a 20 year man in the army and he pissed so many people off that they waited until the absolute last minute possible to screw him out of his 20. He makes these words up too and when people disagree with him, he speaks in what sounds like a poor down syndrome impersonation saying things like "Murican" and such. To be honest, I'm not sure what this is meant to accomplish other than what a child might do by mimicking another person as annoyingly as possible. Of course, when a child does this to an adult, an adult simply ignores it an considers the child's behaviour something that will hopefully improve with maturity.
On a more serious note, let's address you're assertion I can only interpret as meaning that people don't like the recent policies of the FCC because they don't like Trump.
I believe there may be some truth to this. I believe there are
Actually, if you didn't have your own Worker's Comp policy as a subcontractor for 3M, then the insurance company covering 3M for Worker's Comp would have billed 3M for your coverage. Worker's Comp premiums are based off of payroll and it's an accounting exercise to correlate payments to subcontractors with their WC policy numbers to then deduct those amounts from their own payroll totals that are used to calculate the WC premiums for 3M. This was not the state of MN demanding 3M furnish all their subcontractors' WC policy numbers. This was 3M leveraging the subcontractor relationship to reduce their operating expenses as much as possible.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Space based systems, 1-web and starlink, are about to deliver GB speeds to all over, and now FCC is addressing rural.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
perhaps the ISPs could take some their -- what do you call them, ah, yes -- enormous profits and use them to build rural infrastructure all on their own
They are. Not to the extent we want them to, but to a certain extent, they are. They just want someone else to foot the bill.
But if they get this way, I guarantee you that they will define "rural" as generously as possible (because they're already writing the rules), to maximize how much of this money they can spend on -existing- customers that they already provide service to. Then, that money they -used- to spend on existing customers, now covered new tax revenues, can be kept as profit.
Kinda like how when states were debating the green-lighting of lotteries, all the politicians promised, "A portion of the profits will be dedicated to education! Think of the children!" Then the moment the lottery was up and running, politicians cut existing educational budgets to offset the increase from the lottery and gave tax breaks to all the big corporations.
Historically American's violently objected to the government instituting taxes to enrich the profits of select corporations How times have changed.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
I assume that LostMyBeaver was assuming that taxing authorities would use hiring a CDN to prove "nexus" for taxation.
Also the fact that city zoning codes often prohibit productive gardening, as in the case when Oak Park threatened Julie Bass with jail time for growing a victory garden. What Internet connection are farmers supposed to use to upload large files to their crop advisor?
... who, like me, (retired IT guy, 73 years old) predicted back in the mid-late 80s that the government would tax the Internet?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
until the "New" Democrats, aka the Clinton Dems, shift the party to the right.
As for Chicago & Detroit: National problems (like the manufacturing base being outsourced or our disastrous healthcare system) can't be solved at the local level. Who knew?
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One of the reasons we build cities is the concentration of resources makes it easier to provide infrastructure. Sure, it would be nice to live 5 miles from your nearest neighbor and have fiber to your house. It would be nice to live in New York City and have a couple acres with a stream running through it. But you can't have everything. We already have satellite. Sure it's not awesome, but it should be adequate for most peoples needs. If you want streaming Netflix or low-latency gaming, maybe farming's not for you.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Is it in cash, deposited into offshore accounts? Or are his corporate masters going to reward their good little doggy when he's out of the FCC one day, giving him some high-level job for outrageous pay for doing little more than shuffling papers around and getting sucked off by his secretary every day?
Zero chance any of this money ISPs will get from this is going to go to improving anything for consumers, in fact I expect they'll just claim they're 'improving' things, just so they have an excuse to jack up prices even more. Then when Trumps' total mismanagement of international trade causes another massive recession here in the U.S., no one will be able to afford Internet anyway, so I guess The Rich will have all the goddamned bandwidth they want.
People welfare: Bad
Corporate welfare. Good
I don't know how most US citizens get their power, but surely its not that expensive and is considered a utility. Why aren't data lines(fiber) treated the same?
Canadian beer is 6%, so 'better' (spit).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What about my spelling and grammar?
Was there a specific thought which you considered vacuous?
Ahh... I like the Vlad touch... I am a communistic republican actually.... or something close to what that would be if there was a label. I'm pretty close to the republic in my mind, though I'd like to remove some of the L Ron Hubbary bits.