Would You Pay an Internet Broadband Tax? 601
An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Internet Tax Freedom Act? The whole point was to prevent the government from ever taxing the Internet. But that's the proposal from the FCC — and backed by companies like Google, AT&T and Sprint. Would you pay a buck or two extra for fast access — or vote for someone who thinks you should? 'If members of Congress understood that the FCC is contemplating a broadband tax, they'd sit up and take notice,' said Derek Turner, research director for Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that opposes the tax."
Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
If it means universal service provisions for broadband internet access, then yes.
There are people in rural areas right now that don't have Internet access because telcos aren't willing to spend the money to run it out to them.
Universal service provisions allowed telephone service to reach every single person in the entire country back in the day. The same thing should happen for broadband internet access today.
Only if ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if the money actually went to improving broadband access and speeds in America. The problem is that it just goes to the government coffers and is distributed, mostly, to Social Security.
If the money went to directly improving the system it taxed, then yes. I would love to see a tax that helped pay for a nation-wide fiber-optic system that replaced the aged copper system we rely on.
Unfortunately, it'll only go to lining the FCC board and chairman's pockets with money.
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
If that took control away from corporations. (Score:5, Insightful)
If that meant "we" owned the infrastructure, not the media companies. One requirement would HAVE to be net neutrality.
As long as it comes with the right strings (Score:5, Insightful)
I would absolutely pay for an internet tax, as long as any service receiving aid from that government tax coffer was forced to provide network neutrality by law.
As it stands, what this is actually earmarked to pay for is probably the "lawful intercept" features that government want to add to everyone's internet.
No (Score:2, Insightful)
s/Social Security/the Military (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sure why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah they would say "yes it's only $2 and you'll get everything you want"....then a few years later they'll say "in order to give you what you want we need to charge $5"....and a year after that they'll say "in order to maintain the low $5 we need to start filtering content"....then they'll come back and say "the filtering cost money so we need $10"....and the cycle will repeat until eventually you're paying $100/mo in taxes for nothing.
Expect the expected: Past is prologue (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, let's all chip in a buck.
Maybe thirty cents goes into "administrative costs" (the inevitable bureaocracy)
Twenty cents, at least, will be sequestered for other failing programs.
Another forty will no doubt be pocketed by recipient telco shareholders and executives.
Perhaps five cents will go for surveys and studies.
Maybe, if we're lucky, a nickel will go toward the intended purpose.
And so it goes.
Re:Universal service. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do foreigners think it's okay to insult Americans again and again? You're calling us "opossums". I had one British guy say if we don't reelect Obama it will prove we are a "backwards nation". And on and on. Lately everywhere I go I see Europeans slagging-off on Americans.
It makes me think the U.S. should quit NATO rather than be allied with people who hate us. ("We should avoid entangling alliances with european powers that could draw us into bloodshed..... rest assured while one European leader runs-around mad, and the others act as if they are halfway there themselves, we shall remain at peace here in North America." - George Washington)
Re:No, I would not pay another dime. (Score:4, Insightful)
Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt earned a $16.4 Million salary last year.
I fail to see any innovation from my Internet provider.
He got paid 16.4 Million. I doubt he _earned_ that much money for any normal definition of the word.
We already payed the tax and continue to pay it (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called the Universal Access Fund. It's still on your telco bill.
Why would we need yet another tax on our bill just so we can give more money to people that have demonstrated they have absolutely no intention into expanding their offerings.
It's not like the bandwidth is not available. If you have cable, most likely you are already able to get 100/100 Mbps without much of an investment (maybe replace the modem). The fact that you don't have it is because the cable companies don't have any incentive to give you more than 10Mbps because they're the incumbent, they have been granted monopolies in most places and they will rather spend money fighting any competition than giving you more access for free.
Re:Universal service. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Universal service. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do foreigners think it's okay to insult Americans again and again?
Why shouldn't they? Opossums is a very mild insult compared to the things the U.S. government (That was put in place by the U.S. voters.) does all over the world. When the U.S. stops meddling with the foreign nations the U.S. population will be a lot more popular around the world.
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do foreigners think it's okay to insult Americans again and again?...
For the same reason we make fun of them when they do something stupid. When our nation comes off as a series of paranoid religious zealots eagerly awaiting the next talking point from Fox News I can understand why we get insulted. Like it or not, we live in a global economy and we cannot just take our ball and go home. People like you need to develop a thicker skin and realize that it's not personal.
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of taxing the customers, the FCC should be taxing the companies by passing a simple mandate that they Must provide 3 Mbit/s wired service to any customer who asks for it. These billion-dollar corporations can afford to fund this subsidy for a mere 4% of the population.
Who? It's easy when you have a national monopoly for a telephone company - they are required to provide the service to everyone. When you have a set of geographical monopolies as telephone or Internet companies, which one do you force to provide coverage to anyone outside a certain area? How do small companies start up in such an environment? And what happens when Verizon (for example) becomes an umbrella corporation that just puts customers in contact with wholly owned subsidiaries that actually own the network infrastructure, but only in a small area each.
And, longer term, how do you stop this from just being city dwellers subsidising rural house prices? In the UK, it's very common for house prices a few miles outside of town to cost half to three quarters of what an equivalent house would cost in the town. In a really rural area, it can cost under half as much. This difference is because most people are unwilling to pay as much to be so far from infrastructure. If you're spending public money on adding that infrastructure, then you're effectively moving money to the pockets of rural home and land owners.
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone makes an uninformed comment, just dismiss it as uninformed. If someone says something true you find upsetting, you need to examine the root of what they say.
I think you just may be selectively hearing things that displease you. From what I've seen, everyone everywhere says insulting things about everyone else. Right now there is probably some Norwegian making snide comments about Swedes that flies below your radar.
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
It becomes another Tax that you don't consider as a Tax, because it's collected from you at other times and in other ways than on April 15th on a tax form. Just like your car taxes, your property taxes, your hunting licenses, your public park licenses, your telco taxes and fees, your broadband taxes and fees (I don't know about you guys, but my cable broadband bill already includes taxes and fees that are supposedly government-related).
Hey, I'm stuck in a big city where I have access to more job opportunities and super fast internet speeds, but housing is expensive as fuck here. I demand that everyone who owns a house or rents one in a smaller town be forced to chip in a few dollars for me so that I can afford one of these fancy houses. Oh, wait, nevermind. I made the choice that internet access and job opportunities were more important to me than living out in a less serviced area and having a cheap home.
You can have your cake and eat it, too. But I'm not responsible for buying it for you.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Universal service. (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, it's hard not to. You've become exceedingly xenophobic, you're increasingly allowing your religious wingnuts to try to foist their morality on the rest of your society, you've never really played nice with other countries (as evidenced by the rest of your post), and you're so opposed to anything most people would consider progressive as to be a joke. As a nation, you seem increasingly anti-science and backwards, sticking with dogma over any actual facts.
Maybe the rest of the world is tired of the American sense of entitlement, your tendency to export really bad laws onto everybody else, and the fact that ... well ... as a nation you're kind of assholes on balance. At least, that's how you project yourselves. And to the rest of the world, people like George Bush, Sarah Palin, and Run Paul all reinforce that. You're a country who figures the rich should stay rich, and the poor should go fuck themselves.
Bad American debt played a huge part in the financial melt-down of '08 since you guys exported crap debt as if it had any value. America wants to tie their foreign aid to be sure nobody gets access to abortion or contraception (again, your religious wingnuts), and your food export is mostly Monsanto seeds nobody is supposed to actually plant.
It's not just Europeans -- most of the world is tired of putting up with how your country behaves, which is essentially like a spoiled rich kid who wants to be sure he has more than everybody else at the end of the day.
Americans like to think they're the good guys, but they've oblivious to what everyone else in the world wants, and seem totally incapable to having relations with a country in which they're not the ones setting the terms.
Seriously, read some news coverage that originates outside of the US and get a little different perspective. It's not that your allies "hate" you, it's that they're tired of putting up with your shit.
Re:Universal service. (Score:3, Insightful)
So they are far left and far right at the same time?
Do you have no idea what those words mean, or are you out of your damn mind?
They have problems, but you using these words as namecalling is not helping anyone.
Re:Universal service. (Score:2, Insightful)
their continent is falling apart as their socialist and fascist policies have destroyed their economy such that nothing is left but the facade, and that is starting to break apart.
Sorry was that the US or Europe you're talking about? Applies to both pretty well.
Re:Universal service. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do foreigners think it's okay to insult Americans again and again?
As an American, we deserve it.
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
Iceland is doing pretty well, thank you - as are all of the most highly socialist Scandinavian states.
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, seriously. "More taxes to help people" my ass. We've seen how that goes, time and time again.
In addition to it just being corporate welfare, you can bet that it'd be more than "a buck or two". If the current tax structure is any indication, there'd be at least another 5% tax hidden in the bill.
I live in a relatively rural area. I have no problem paying $30/month for a dribble of broadband. It's what I was paying for cable internet back in '99 for a DOCSIS 1 (unmetered) line. There's a problem with that, however: I'm still getting roughly the same downstream bandwidth, no improvement to latency, and a severely crippled upstream - a supposed 40/5 Mbit line, though I rarely see anything more than 20/2. My bill is also $50/month, with a good portion of that going to taxes already.
These same taxes were supposed to 'improve rural broadband'. It hasn't happened. The entire western half of Wyoming has been operating on a single OC-3 conneection since the late 1990s. Weren't rural broadband initiatives, tax structures, etc supposed to improve this situation.
Instead, most of the various telecommunication taxes have gone to fund things like free teleconference lines which get utilized (primarily) by businesses most obviously not in rural areas. This discrepancy alone is probably enough to balance out the "flyover tax burden benefit" which supposedly exists.
Nope, all Left (Score:1, Insightful)
So they are far left and far right at the same time?
Fascism is inherently based [amazon.com] in socialism .
After all, Fascism is all about the elite knowing what is best for the people - just like socialism, or many modern day progressives.
If you don't want the government to interfere with your life then why would anyone vote for more government?
Re:Universal service. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I might point out that it was you guys who waded into Iraq and Afghanistan and pretty much demanded the world follow along with you ... I believe Bush famously said "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists". You'll notice that lots of other countries committed resources (and lives) to that, but in the end, absolutely none of the reasons it was done were ever proven to be valid. There never was a good reason to go into Iraq, but you guys bullied everyone else into doing it with you.
This is a two way street. And if you want to start disentangling yourselves from your allies, well, you might not find yourself with much support later.
I'm sure the Europeans aren't all that thrilled with their banking and flight data being handed over to serve US interests. So maybe everyone just says "well, since you think we're not such good allies, we're not doing that any more".
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
I am European, and I think that fast Internet for free should be available to anyone in EU, as part of basic human rights. I don't care how it is technically done, but this should be long-term goal, especially for social parties, in order to prevent new kind of illiteracy of poor people.
You cannot reasonably claim a Right to be given a service for free. As there is no such thing as anything for free, what you're really demanding is that the government use force of arms to take from one set of people and give to another.
And people wonder why the EU is falling apart financially....
Re:Universal service. (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that you are having trouble mapping the ideas to your flawed conceptual model is your own problem, not his. The defining feature of both extreme fascism and extreme socialism is that they're authoritarian, and from that perspective they look the same.
Besides, governments are schizophrenic anyway; it's perfectly reasonable to expect them to exhibit opposite traits at once!
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or better yet we recognize this as the NON PROBLEM it is and don't tax anyone. Seriously if you live in the middle of no where, pay what costs if you want service. The telco WILL drag T-Carrier out anywhere you want it! Might cost you 1/2 million but they will do it.
Alternatively the universal service fund has already guaranteed you dialup!
There is lot that is great about living in the sticks, no traffic, low taxes, usually cozy interactions with smallish participatory local government, and others but high speed network access is not none of them.
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
They have their own problems they don't want to face, like the fact that their continent is falling apart as their socialist and fascist policies have destroyed their economy such that nothing is left but the facade, and that is starting to break apart.
This is nonsensical demagoguery. There are no "fascist" countries in Europe today with the possible exception of Hungary under Fidesz. And the most "socialist" nations in the European Union tend to be the ones that are doing best. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, all are doing fine. Even Iceland recovered quite nicely after its bank crisis of a few years back. It's not the cradle of social democracy that is suffering from the current debt crunch; it's Greece, which never should even have been admitted to the EU in the first place. And Greece isn't really that socialist. They have a bunch of overpaid public employees, which is not the same thing.
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
The defining feature of both extreme fascism and extreme socialism is that they're authoritarian, and from that perspective they look the same.
That might be an appropriate observation if we're talking about the similarities between Hitler and Stalin, but it has no relevance to modern-day Europe. By normal standards, the social democracies of Northern Europe are about the least "authoritarian" countries in the world. They have free speech, free elections, strong middle classes, and far fewer people in prison than the US.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is why much of Europe is broke and and the EU is on the verge of breaking up. Of course, we American's are not doing much better. But the point is that our priorities are all out of whack. Everyone seems to want something for nothing. This attitude will not last the test of time.
Funnily enough, that's not it.
The countries in Europe with the most expansive and expensive social welfare programmes are doing relatively well. It's the countries that followed the US financial model more closely (Greece and Ireland especially, and the UK somewhat) with an over-reliance on the financial sector as the next great engine of their economies and a tax system that ensured they were sitting on a bubble that eventually burst.
The countries that are now bailing them out are the ones with the high taxes and extensive welfare state provisions, like Germany, France and (again to a lesser extent, since we fucked up too), the UK.
It's not welfare programmes that bankrupted certain Eurozone countries, it was the financial policies at the other end of the scale - the banks, the toxic loans, the irresponsible tax policy, financial deregulation and the shedding of manufacturing and other things that previously kept the economy going. The welfare state is the reason that we don't have a social underclass who lost everything when the economy crashed and had some support until they were able to get back to work again without losing everything they owned.
You're also mistaken if you think "much of" Europe is broke.
Re:Universal service. (Score:2, Insightful)
They have their own problems they don't want to face, like the fact that their continent is falling apart as their socialist and fascist policies have destroyed their economy such that nothing is left but the facade, and that is starting to break apart.
Yes, but we also insult americans because they cant tell the difference between Greece and Sweden!
Re:Universal service. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's rich considering which is the nation dragging others into Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of the reasons joining NATO right now is a bit sketchy is that USA has already made a habit of calling anything it wants an act of war(thus requiring others to join their cause in "defense" of USA). It's supposed to be a defense pact - not a contract to join in attacks even if Americans want to interpret it as such when it suits them.
Insulting America is just so easy, thanks to your tv-show export business and fuckups in other fields like handling of cellular networks. Maximum profit with least work - that's the American way(even if building proper networks would be more profit overall).
Bums in Manhattan have better manners than in Helsinki though, I'll give you that - but it's pretty twisted to say that Europeans would use NATO to get USA into war with Iran...
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
And who would stop them? I hate to break it to you, but our military spending means you don't have to, and your leaders have been banking on that for decades.
Re:Universal service. (Score:4, Insightful)
Their national average according to speedtest is just ~25 Mbit.
I think what is important is not the average speed users get, but the speed that is available to them if they choose to pay for it. Not everyone will have use for a fast connection so many users will opt for a cheaper plan, but I think everyone should at least have the option to get a fast connection.
I live in the Netherlands, average speed according to speedtest is 27Mbit. Relatively fast internet (100Mbit+) is available to most people in the country, but many choose slower and cheaper connections and that's fine. I don't believe the goal should be to have broadband in every home, it should be to have broadband available as an option for anyone who chooses to have it. Lots of places simply don't have an option to get fast internet, and I think that is a more important metric than average internet speeds across the country.
Re:Universal service. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problem: the vast majority of the "Americans" doing the talking are the ones that make us look bad. Those of us who are reasonable and "European" in our viewpoints and politics aren't the ones that are getting heard.
And it's not just a "media bias" thing. Even looking objectively at our own domestic media the Right Wing is the one doing all the shouting.
Re:Nope, all Left (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether or not it's fascist doesn't matter because it violates the Constitution:
Article I, Section 7:
Re:Universal service. (Score:2, Insightful)
So they are far left and far right at the same time?
Do you have no idea what those words mean, or are you out of your damn mind?
They have problems, but you using these words as namecalling is not helping anyone.
Do you know what they mean? Socialism is a system where the government owns/controls the means of production. A fascist government is authoritarian government where production is owned by individuals but controlled by the government. The far Left in the US is defiantly socialist but the far right (Libertarians) are not fascists they are not for government control of private business. It would be very easy for a government to have both Socialists and Fascists traits as some privately owned business could be controlled by the state and other means of production owned by the state. That would satisfy requirements for both and is very possible.
Re:Universal service. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Universal service. (Score:4, Insightful)
Based on your post, I'm fairly sure that you're not from America and you don't realize how ridiculously broad our political idiocy has made the terms "fascist" and "socialist" over here.
The simplest way to explain the American use of the term "socialist" is that the term is applied to anything that would benefit people below the top 5% income bracket if it doesn't also help the people in the top 5% and/or corporations. In fact, the benefit to the top 5% and corporations generally has to outweigh any benefit to the lower 95% by a very large margin before it will no longer be decried as a socialist.
The American use of "fascist" is simpler. Any time a law is past that restricts someone in any way, shape or form from doing something they want to do (even if it's obviously beneficial like "it's illegal to inject yourself with Draino"), it's fascist and the political figure they dislike the most is now exactly like Hitler.
But then you have a minority of Americans, like me, who at least try to use the terms correctly. Sadly, by doing so,, we add to the confusion over what the hell everyone is talking about.
This concludes today's lesson on America's abuse of the English language. Thank you and good night.
Re:Universal service. (Score:4, Insightful)
And that is why the US is destined to fall behind. Selfish pricks think even a dollar to help the nation is too much.
The people that want all of the advantages of living out in the sticks whole accepting none of the downsides, by forcing everyone to pay to eliminate those downsides, are the selfish pricks.
Nice try.