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On 28.09.11 11:26, michael gurstein wrote:
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<div><font color="#0000ff" face="Arial" size="2"><span
class="660351608-28092011">An interesting suggestion that my
friend Arthur Cordell has been advocating here in Canada for
a number of years.</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#0000ff" face="Arial" size="2"><span
class="660351608-28092011"></span></font> </div>
<div><font color="#0000ff" face="Arial" size="2"><span
class="660351608-28092011">M</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#0000ff" face="Arial" size="2"><span
class="660351608-28092011"></span></font></div>
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[...]<br>
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<div>If there's a new economy, there should be a new tax base. To
follow the information highway analogy, it would be similar to a
gasoline tax, or a toll on bridges or highways. Why not tax
digital traffic, asks Arthur? </div>
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This was tried a number of times, in different forms in the
'traditional' telecoms and with the rise of Internet it was proved
absurd.<br>
<br>
Just who the 'carriers' are? Do we tax international traffic only?
Or do we tax your home wireless network? What about the bluetooth
traffic between your mobile phone and your laptop? <br>
<br>
Taxing traffic effectively means you punish the more innovative and
growing infrastructures and encourage limiting connection speeds and
eliminating protocols that generate excessive traffic. We went
trough great pains for many years to just ensure the opposite...<br>
<br>
One example of already taxing traffic is the radio frequency
allocation. You pay taxes for your allocated frequency band. While
it is possible to use higher density encoding to pack more (data)
bandwidth into the same frequency band, the difference is not much
(and the cost increases dramatically) because mathematical/physical
limits come into play. Only by introducing 'shared' and 'free for
all' frequency bands it was possible to pack lots and lots more
(data) bandwidth in wireless networks.<br>
<br>
Therefore, wireless and satellite links already do pay taxes for
their bits. It is only fiber and copper lines that do not pay (yet).
These are considered, by most regulators to not be limited resource.<br>
<br>
It is like paying a tax for the light reaching one point from
another...<br>
<br>
Daniel<br>
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