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WTO May Extend E-Commerce Import Duty Moratorium
Pig Hogger writes "A meeting of World Trade Ministers would seem to propose an
18 month extension of the duty break that currently applies to cyberspace.
But the fact is, the duty break only applies to what is transmitted electronically, so therefore imposing duties on such would essentially be unenforcable by customs officials...
However, it is being proposed by the US that such a duty exemption be extended to the 'physical equivalent' of goods such as digital music and software. Can you spell MEDIA?" The story's from Fox News.
They should get their shit together and either impose duties or not, none of these extension shenanigans.. A lot of businesses are counting on duty-free e-commerce to continue in order to be successful.
Hopefully this is just the first step in governments realizing that there are no national boundaries on the internet and that attempting to enforce them is a waste of resources.
~Caliban
For the first time, we're seeing governments act intelligently. They don't know what is happening with the Internet, so they are taking a wait and see attitude. Catalogs had the opportunity to eliminate Brick-and-Mortar, they didn't.
A long-term decision would be unwise. Nobody knows what the future will bring for Cyberspace, and decisions can always be reversed. A 1.5 year decision is unlikely to be revisited until it is time to discuss an exemption. This allows the WTO to revisit the issue as the transistions are taking place.
In the long run, the Internet MAY make sales/VAT taxes irrelevant as geography becomes silly. On the other hand, if localities eliminate the tax advantage of E-businesses by eliminating VAT/sales taxes, then we may see a long term vision which involves both brick-and-mortar and E-businesses. The WTO is wise to take a wait and see approach.
Although I like having things be duty-free, I would really like to see an actual solution put in place. I am an e-commerce developer, and I would really prefer to have the law determined soon, even if it means paying a duty, so I do not have to go back and change my programs later. This also goes for the internet-sales-tax issue.
There is a bunch of information at this site and many others regarding the WTO and why there is a formidable protest being organised for the meeting in Seattle. Some folks down here in Dallas are organizing a demonstration to show solidarity with the Seattle protesters, we are few, but if you're interested and in Dallas, swing by the bulletin board at this site and hook up with us. It'd be great to see some people in different cities doing the same if they are unable to get to seattle.
Aaron said it was unlikely that proposal would be approved at the upcoming ministerial meeting, but he was optimistic an agreement could be reached before the next WTO ministerial meeting in three years.
Is it just me, or should maybe the World Trade Organization hold ministerial meetings just a tad more often than every three years? Don't get me wrong, I support their 'wait-and-see' approach, as it is almost a first in good government strategy. Almost always this approach is used exactly when it doesn't need to be by governments. But it's rather obvious they've taken to sticking their nose into internet trade, and if for no other reason than that, they should meet more often.
Who can keep up with something as fast-paced as the internet, and yet choose to meet that seldom?
This assuredly good news, but I'm a little disappointed that it even needs be discussed.
One thing that has been fundamentally obvious for a long time is that the new world of global telecommunications and "cyberspace" necessitates a serious legal rethinking. It's not at all clear "where" something happens or exists. The courts are decades behind the pace of technology at it is. In the 80s I ran a local BBS and came across this issue. If there is a legal dispute between two users, it was unclear whether the laws of the location of the BBS, the location of the accused, or the location of the accuser applied. I had imagined that this would be resolved by an act of congress within a few years. Yeah right. Over a decade later, the situation has become tremendously murkier, and no legal progress has been made.
We live in a world in which nobody knows where they are, or whose laws apply to them. A message travelling between two cities in Switzerland could go through half a dozen countries on the way. Or several dozen. And people imagine that they can even *define* an import or export, let alone monitor, regulate or tax them?!!
*click* *click*
I'm outside the US!
*click* *click*
Now I'm back in!
*click* *click*
Outside the US again!
What are you gonna do, tell my legions of electrons to stop at the router for an inspection? You'll find they're largely negatively charged from being spammed alot, but little else...
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Historically duties and sales taxes comes from the ancient marketplace. The sellers would pay a small fee to the market which would help to promote it and, crucially, guarantee and enforce a certain standard and a consistent set of rules for trade. (Big) Government has taken over the role as the overseer of trading standards and as the guarantoor of the order of the "marketplace". It has also taken the market tax.
However, in the internet age this approach is looking increasingly strange. I, as a consumer, can buy goods anywhere at the click of a mouse, and the government can not hope to regulate all and every market. And even if I knew the physical location of the seller (not a trivial thing) and even if the local government enforced a reasonable set of trading standards (obviously not true everywhere), it would be very difficult and expensive for me to actually seek redress in a local court.
The solution, in my opinion, is to return to the medieval market arrangement. Let us have private markets which regulate themselves, and let the consumers decide which markets to deal in. It is not a completely alien idea: most stock markets operate in this way (even if they are not exactly free from government regulation) and most of the online markets (e.g. e-bay, amazon, ...) have at least some rules and attempts at consumer protection.
The bad news for govenrment is that it will loose a lot of revenue. But it will also loose some of the responsibility (if it can ever give up power!) and therefore, presumably, costs. In the future governments will increasingly have to rely on taxing immobile value like land and buildings. Trade and people are both becoming too mobile.
Incidently the UK has a funny half-way house where I as a consumer can choose to sue my UK credit card company instead of the retailer for any disputes over a purchase. Interesting: as money become increasingly a branded commodity is this the way forward?
Hi!
Fundamentally what is a tax? A forced contribution to provide for public benefits which would be too difficult to charge for directly. E.g. laws/regulation, self-defense, public health information. etc. There are a couple of problems with taxing the internet, unlike federal roads computer networks are essentially privately owned (ignoring the academic/government bits) and (AOL/MSN/Yahoo notwithstanding) market forces have compelled players to interoperate, if only to get a slice of a larger pie.
Secondly, governments, despite their perception of gross stupidity, are not ignorant about the economic benefits of IT. Any one government that wants to put a tarriff/tax on IT traffic will find itself in a comparative disadvantage as firms immediately relocate their services offshore and land their fibre cables elsewhere. How many country towns disappeared due to newly created highways bypassing their locales?
Thirdly is what exactly is there to be taxed? Can you demand 20% of all the bits flowing along a wire? Can you have half a promise (essentially what money has now devolved to)? Much of the information that flows nowadays are transactions, or essentially bookkeeping activities between firms or internal transfers between business units of the same company. Calculating a dollar cost is a complex task. For its 10% GST impost, the Australian government tried to figure out a value-added-tax formula for financial transactions but gave up in the end.
As for juristiction, that is another whole can of worms that nobody wants to touch due to the headaches (and politics) involved. There will always be the odd-ball country that will refuse to play along (why do you think international tax havens exist?). Even if the US government unilaterally imposed the ol' greenback on the rest of the world with all the associated legal baggage, some smart cookie will find a solution to avoid confiscatory measures like establishing extra-territorial oil platforms beyond national maritine borders to host electronic services. Identities and paper corporations can be created faster than any countermeasure to crack down so it becomes a losing game. One can only look at corporations like Fox/News to see how shifting costs between countries can add extra value to the bottom-line.
As one wag used to say, he doesn't think the government is that efficient that its worth giving them more than the minimum required by law. Perhaps the only solution is to become rich then let public pressure and social stigma require individual voluntary contributions to non-profit causes.
LL
... is here
On a related gripe, I work in the World Trade center in Seattle - there are supposed to be 50 thousand people protesting that day...
I have this funny feeling that it is going to be difficult for me to get in that week.
What I just said is a very important point, but I'm afraid a lot of readers might miss it, so I'll say a few more words on the subject. World Trade Organization, do you feel no shame for what you've done? This is a fine example of what I've been talking about. Even with the increasing number of cantankerous champions of deceit, lies, theft, plunder, and rapine, World Trade Organization often flirts with mercantalism. World Trade Organization is doing the very thing for which it criticizes others. No wonder that a central fault line runs through each of World Trade Organization's utterances. Specifically, there are some simple truths in this world. First, World Trade Organization's propositions are incompatible with the proclivities of instrumental reason. Second, World Trade Organization's cronies have the power to stultify art and retard the enjoyment and adoration of the beautiful whenever they feel like it. And finally, unimaginative semi-intelligible loons have traditionally tried to piggyback on substantive issues to gain legitimacy for themselves. Unfortunately, I can already see the response to this letter. Someone, possibly World Trade Organization itself or one of its lackeys, will write an indecent piece about how utterly cocky I am. If that's the case, then so be it. What I just wrote sorely needed to be written
no text
Sales Tax is not the only way governments can get funded, and they are not the best by far.
Tax Sales are unfair cause they are not progressive.
Now on an 'ecological' point of view. Tax sales is an incentive for rich people to invest their money in finance instead of buying taxed goods. Income tax on the other side favors people with low income as they get more cash after tax than people with higher revenue for the same work provided
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Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
If you really care about the third world, you should be campaigning against barriers, tariffs and government subsidies. Instead it seems you are trying to preserve all three.
No, if you are going to Seattle you should support the WTO, and support open competitive markets. It's a much better way forward than corrupt or corruptible government preference.
Bizarre...
Apparently, some countries actually believe that the treaties they make are binding, and that they should be held to account if they fail to comply.
What a very odd notion.
Amen.
Both internationally - and here.
Open competetive markets ..\snip/.. better way forward than corrupt or corruptible government preference.
H'mmmm.
I must have missed the meeting where we decided that big business decided global law. Do you happen to have the minutes from it?
Post most recent to the 11/14/99 9:20:00 am EST!!! YEAH!!
But I can find my caps-lock, key, too!
A-a-and furthermore, I also know that "media" was correctly used for once (perhaps the only time in www history!), because it really is the plural! Yes, and by the same token, it's not the #$%@!%& singular. The singular is "medium". Humans take note! Gray Space Aliens are excused, 'cause it's not yer native language.
Dear Moderator: Please exorcise this vile, evil post to the -1 netherworld where it belongs. We all know it's bad (bad, bad, bad!) to tell people things they don't know -- after all, that might imply that I know something they don't, and that might hurt somebody's feelings! And we all know it's better to feel good about ourselves than to learn stuff, 'cause learning's hard. It's oh so much better just to be happy (happy, happy, happy!). Oh, I'm ever so glad I'm not one of those Alphas -- they're far too clever!
Not according to slipdash's timewarp:
Post most recent to the 11/14/99 9:20:30 pm EST!!! (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 14, @**08:36PM** EST (#37)
But I thought I had mentioned this before, and had been summarialy subject to a rash of -1's for mentioning slashdot can't keep its clock straight. It was almost a day wrong at one point (boy, I love living in the same timezone as slashdot, I can say that for real) Time to fone Dallas for a more accurate replacement.
Oh, it's 11:02 pm (or so) here, right now... Lets see what this post lands at. Should be good fun.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Sorry Marshall MacL -- soundbite rejected: no such thing as medium.
No internet shops pay duties on
international packages.
that's not all good because
they rely on the local customs to
add the local tax to the value
of the package.
Today you will probably not get caught
but pretty soon customs will have to
scan packages for senders like "AMAZON"
and all books will cost 25% more.
This might not be amazon's problem, but
if they can't do anything about it
they will soon find out when people
will have to pay 25% more for their books.
It's better to act before they start
loosing international customers and
set a standard for where to pay tax
so you won't take the risk paying
tax twice everytime you shop on the
internet.
Certain countries (not mine) don't
have tax on books, but this just
makes our customs more determined
to make us pay up - which will
make them better at finding and
taxing other goods.
I don't like to pay tax, but I would
like to be able to buy something
anywhere, like I bought electronics
from HK last week, and not risking
it being stuck at the border waiting
for me to pay up 25% of its value.
Or worse 25% of it's nominal value
which could add upp to anything.
Patrik
Robert X Cringely says Why the Internet Exemption From Taxes is Not Entirely a Good Thing.
He warns that it will lead to include an "Internet transaction" in your supermarket buy.
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__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
see Hugh Kenner's thoughts on the guy -- Kenner started out as a student of McLuhan, knew him well for many years, and continued to like and admire him on a personal level even after coming to disagree with many (if not all) of McLuhan's views.
There is no singular for the meaning of information broadcasting.
Uh, read the definitions again.
An "agency" is "a thing which acts", or "a process of acting". It absolutely does not mean "organization". Some organizations are referred to as "agencies" because (in theory
If both "means" and "agency" are used to describe the same word, that does not make them synonymns -- it means that the word being defined bears a semantic resemblance to both of them. If they both meant the same exact thing, there would be no need to use them both.
"Media" is and for thousands of years has been the plural of "medium". Radio is one medium of communication; TV is another. The whole ugly panoply taken at once is "The Media" (or the "Liberal Media" if you live in a bunker
Furthermore, nobody's talking about broadcasting. See below; he's talking about information storage.
So what Roblimo should have said was:
Can you spell the media?
I don't agree at all with that one, either. Here's his sentence again (which I think he was quoting from somebody else, by the way):
. . . it is being proposed by the US that such a duty exemption be extended to the 'physical equivalent' of goods such as digital music and software. Can you spell MEDIA?
It looks to me like he's referring not to communications media, but to information-storage media -- where, again, CD-ROM is a medium, mag tape is another, punch cards are a third, etc. In other words, media on which "digital music and software" are stored. (Yes, I know punch-cards aren't much used for storing music, but they are a means of storing information
All in all, you missed both his point and mine in a variety of ways.
I don't care what Roblimo sez or how he sez it, but like to see the record straight when people complain about his grammar/spelling.
God save us from hopeless ignorami who want to "set the record straight" about things they simply don't grasp.
in the Oxford English Mini-Dictionary [wow, I gotta get me the full version]
The full OED, which is close to 30 volumes and will fill a small car, costs a few thousand bucks and won't fit in your backpack. Fortunately, you can pick up the "Compact" version for under US$400.00 bucks if you look around. It's the full 27+ volume real deal, compressed into one very broad and dense volume by photoreduction, with nine pages of the original on each page of the "compact" version. It comes with a powerful magnifying lens