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

[michael gurstein]

-----Original Message-----
From: Arthur Cordell [mailto:denart40 at sympatico.ca] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 8:22 AM
To: 'michael gurstein'
Subject: RE: [governance] Can a bit tax bring a New Wealth of Nations?



Mike,

 

I subbed to the list but it will take 24 hours before my name is activated.

 

Meanwhile I offer the link below which should answer some of questions.

 

 <http://www.arraydev.com/commerce/jibc/9702-05.htm>
http://www.arraydev.com/commerce/jibc/9702-05.htm


Taxing the Internet: The Proposal for a Bit Tax


 

 

From: michael gurstein [mailto:gurstein at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 10:43 AM
To: Arthur Cordell
Subject: FW: [governance] Can a bit tax bring a New Wealth of Nations?

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Kalchev [mailto:daniel at digsys.bg] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 2:00 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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