I can see the next new tech. The building of an island from junked pc
equipment out in international waters with satillite links just so they can
get around the tax issue.

Strange, but who would have thought about paying $1 - $3 for a bottle of
water 30 years ago.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Wonsil" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 8:22 PM
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Taxing Your E-Mail


> Wirt Atmar wrote:
> >>  With no law to stop them, state and local officials can
> >>  start taxing everything from spam filters to instant messages to
> >>  Google searches. E-mail taxes alone would be a gold mine for
> >>  free-spending politicians across the country.
> >
> > Those few sentences are just more nonsense from the people who run
> > the Wall Street Journal.
>
> Considering some of us live in a Country that got a kick start from
> "creative taxation", I believe that when it comes to taxation our elected
> officials are so serious about generating revenue that there is just no
> concept of nonsense.  Latte tax anyone?
>
> (I've often wondered that if governments spend as much time serving the
> people than they do on tax collection, we'd have a pretty wonderful world.
> The same could be said for software vendors who spend more time and effort
> on license enforcement than the actual product, but that is for another
> day.)
>
> >> Yeah, Wirt, but how do you collect tax on international spammers?  You
> can't
> >> tax people you can't find.
> >>
> >You don't have to. There are only a few entry points into the US. The US
> >imposes taxes on all emails entering the US and backbills the originating
> ISP
> >entity. It then becomes the responsibility of the ISP to parcel out its
> cumulative
> >charges to its various customers. The ISP always knows who its customers
> are.
>
> Wireless could be an interesting case...
>
> The taxes proposed are not federal as I understand it.  Without the
> moratorium, the concern is that the States will start taxing ANY traffic
> going through their State.  The only kind of tax that could work is a
packet
> tax, and even that would be hard to enforce.  You would almost have to
look
> at the road system as a model.  You could have freeways, which are funded
by
> broad-based taxes paid by all whether they use the resource or not or toll
> roads where users pay to play.  I would imagine that some states would
> charge no tax and others (California, Ohio and New York) would charge
more.
> This would bring into the world a whole new industry - LTR: Least Tax
> Routing companies.  It would be conceivable that some ISPs could go
entirely
> satellite to avoid traveling through another state.  Smaller ISPs would
pick
> up the tab or go under, so expect a lot of lobbying from the AOLs and
> Earthlinks of the world.  If nothing else, the cost of compliance would
put
> a lot of smaller companies out of business.  It makes me think of a
certain
> New Mexican company that didn't want to collect taxes for California.  ;-)
>
> Most taxes start out small and then grow (see income, Medicare, social
> security, automobile registration in California) and no taxes ever go away
> (are the rural areas electrified yet?  Have we paid for the
Mexican-American
> war?)  Eventually taxes will get large enough that an offshore company
> starts an all satellite Internet business or it becomes price effective to
> use private networks separate from the Internet.
>
> In any case, any kind of tax enforcement would be difficult to implement
if
> not impossible but I would never underestimate a State treasurer's
> imagination.  The only chance is to tax the big hitters (MCI, UUNET,
> Sprint,...) and they would pass the costs on down the line.  I just can't
> see how they can technically target email.  It's just too easy to evade.
> Any centralization, if it could be done, would invite all kinds of trouble
> for the civil libertarians.
>
> Mark W.
>
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