[governance] France Proposes an Internet Tax

[parminder]

The proposition that governments should collect a tax because companies 
gather personal information prima facie does not appeal very much to me. 
It seems to raise a number of difficult questions - for instance, in 
collecting such a tax what kind of blanket permission may be taken to 
have been granted for what kind of practices.. One will however have to 
read the whole report to be able to give an informed comment on the 
proposal which I reserve for the present.

What is important to stress here however is the larger issue that these 
kinds of news and reports bring up, and increasingly so. Some of us have 
been trying to raise the issue for a long time on this list and other 
global IG fora; that IG centrally implicated a huge number of very 
important issues of economic distribution and social justice. It not 
just a matter of civil and political rights. We need to raise, 
understand and analyse these issues and possible ways to address them. 
This is something the global civil society engaged in the IG area has 
completely failed to so do, which has affected its credibility among the 
political actors in the South. And also among the global civil society 
groups active in issues of economic and social justice. IGC must look 
for ways to create the needed bridges with these constituencies and 
groups, for it to emerge as a credible/ premier civil society group  in 
the area of global IG...

parminder




On Tuesday 22 January 2013 08:54 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
>
>         The report published Friday said a tax on data collection was
>         justified on grounds that users of services like Google and
>         Facebook are, in effect, working for these companies without
>         pay by providing the personal information that lets them sell
>         advertising.
>
>         */[Milton L Mueller] Good deal. In order to compensate and
>         protect us from “working without pay” we will work for the
>         government of France without pay as well. Cartesian logic at
>         work./*
>
>         */Or perhaps they will use the revenues to subsidize access to
>         Facebook and Google, since they charge their users so much
>         that…um, well, some of them, um, can’t afford… oh, never mind./*
>
>         */Of course, this is just a tax on the advertisers, in the
>         end. It will simply increase the costs of Google/Facebook and
>         be recovered from advertisers. /*
>
>         */It wouldn’t be France however unless you threw a soupcon of
>         anti-Americanism and trade protectionism into the pot as well
>         (will the same tax will be applied to all commercial
>         broadcasters in France, whose viewers are sold to advertisers
>         “without pay”?) How about French newspapers with ads – their
>         poor customers even have to pay for the newspaper, and then
>         are sold to advertisers. Merde!/*
>
>         */Interestingly, this whole line of argument presumes that the
>         services users receive in return for their data are worthless.
>         Remember that next time you hear someone claim that Google and
>         Facebook are “essential facilities” that no one can live
>         without./*
>
>         */It’s sad that governments that just want more money have to
>         strain to come up with trendy rationalizations. What happened
>         to the good old days when they just sent in armed thugs to
>         appropriate a bunch of your pigs and cows?/*
>

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