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

[Carlos A. Afonso]

I think we are talking about travelling bits instead of just bits per se? :)

--c.a.

On 09/28/2011 09:29 AM, Lee W McKnight wrote:
> I have to agree with Daniel, this has been talked about forever and is just...as Spock would say, not logical.
>
> There is no shortage of bits, there is no government allocation of bits, there is no public bit resource.
>
> Which is not to say, as was said in the early days of the net ' a bit is a bit.'
>
> All bits are not created equal, and some are worth way more than others.
>
> Eg, bits helping Warren Buffett keep track of his money are worth more than ones..tracking my debts ; )
>
> Since some bits - in transit -do cross public rights of way, or otherwise use public resources like spectrum, there are - taxable - nodes/transit points out there.
>
> But a generalized tax on digital 'traffic' would mean for example that digital tv would be taxed out of existence, since hdtv hogs - bits.
>
> OK, assuming we kill hdtv, then we are left with all those Youtube videos which are also - wasting scarce bits? Or just enabling us to waste our time?
>
> Ok, maybe those are not the worst outcome imaginable, but still...
>
> Lee
> ________________________________________
> From: governance at lists.cpsr.org [governance at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Kalchev [daniel at digsys.bg]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 5:00 AM
> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; michael gurstein
> Cc: 'Economics of IP Networks'
> Subject: Re: [governance] Can a bit tax bring a New Wealth of Nations?
>
> 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
>
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