[governance] Can a bit tax bring a New Wealth of Nations?

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 28.09.11 11:26, michael gurstein wrote:
> An interesting suggestion that my friend Arthur Cordell has been 
> advocating here in Canada for a number of years.
> M
[...]
> 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?


This was tried a number of times, in different forms in the 
'traditional' telecoms and with the rise of Internet it was proved absurd.

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?

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...

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.

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.

It is like paying a tax for the light reaching one point from another...

Daniel

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20110928/ad99905d/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t