[governance] France Proposes an Internet Tax

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

I completely agree with only the first paragraph that Parminder wrote.  The tax as such is infeasible, and creates a perverse sort of balance between information gathered and amount of tax levied.   It also pays absolutely no attention to the privacy aspects of information gathering.

The second paragraph, casting this in a broader context .. well, I disagree.  We need to stick to a narrow and focused scope of definition for IG, without which we squander our efforts and limited resources.

--srs (iPad)

On 24-Jan-2013, at 10:24, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:

> 
> 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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