Uproar as Uganda telecom companies implement mobile money, social media taxes | Hacker News Reader

Uproar as Uganda telecom companies implement mobile money, social media taxes

monitor.co.ug

90 pointsbenryon37 comments

So the government decided that it was a good idea to tax OTT services, defined as:

The transmission or receipt of voice messages over the internet protocol network and includes access to virtual private networks but does not include educational or research sites prescribed by the Minister by notice in the gazette.

Quite a nonsensical definition really. Might as well tax internet access (which you already do).

On top of that, the only way to pay this tax is via mobile money, which is taxed 1% at point of deposit, 1% at point of transaction and 1% at point of withdrawal. You’re being taxed to pay tax.

And when you do pay the 200 shilling tax (which is actually 202 shillings), they only activate your social media access until 11.59pm today. Regardless of when you paid. So, if you pay the tax at 11.30pm today, you’ve got only 30 minutes of use.

The most interesting quote is about the history behind the tax:

"President Yoweri Museveni reportedly wrote a letter complaining to the finance minster about online gossip and suggesting a tax be introduced to “cope with consequences.”"

Wouldn’t it be easier for the government to tax the ISPs and data providers the 202 shillings and let that cost be passed on to the consumer?

(Ugandan)

I think it’s legal gymnastics. Firstly, this “tax” is officially excise duty on OTT services. Data & voice already attract (heavy) excise duty. So if they tacked it onto your phone bill, it would walk and quack like a hike in excise duty on data and voice plans.

Second issue - what if I don’t use any OTT services? But the phone company wants to just add 202/- per day to my bill? (That’s the route a few ISPs have gone down. Waiting for them to be challenged)

There are a few other issues, but those are my main suspicions.

Great question! It depends what the goal of the tax is. Is the goal of the tax to raise revenue or to give the state more visibility on how its subjects use social media?

If the objective is in fact the latter objective of gaining information, having a small direct tax might be sufficient to cover the costs of setting up a new bureaucracy to more closely monitor the online activities of subjects.

In some sense, such a tax would essentially serve the same purpose as the global tax on wealth suggested by Thomas Piketty at the end of "Capital in the 21st Century". Piketty suggested that initially, some countries could decree a very low tax on wealth -- I forget the exact number, but let's say it's a 0.01% annual tax on wealth. This would require setting up all of the bureaucratic apparatus to measure and tax wealth, which as a side effect would produce a huge volume of new information that researchers, policy-makers and regulators could use as inputs to make more informed decisions about future taxation policy or controls for offshore tax evasion, etc.

See also James C. Scott's book "Seeing Like a State".

Of course, another objective might not be to monitor people but instead simply make it more irritating for subjects to use social media, by requiring them to first get permission from a government bureaucracy. This would discourage people from using mainstream social media and push them into something else (smaller niche services, encrypted chat, coup-d'etat, ...)

My key takes on this article are:

1) Gov needed more $$$. They could either reform/progress the state and let the economy generate freely the extra $$$ in 2-5-10 years OR impose a new tax "on those slackers who spend all day in social media". They chose the latter as they can create a narrative to convince the masses on the validity of this new tax. Edit/addition: And the fact that reforming the state requires change, disrupting cliques, reduce corruption, reduce bureaucracy, so instead they thrash anything modern they cannot control and doesn't serve the "old ideas".

2) "Sample" of 2700 and then calling it "National IT Survey" in a 20.7m population is a joke/travesty. It looks like they shared some A4 pages in a couple of ministries, asked the employees to get their kids to fill them up and called it a day.

Apologies for over simplifying things.

> "Sample" of 2700 and then calling it "National IT Survey" in a 20.7m population is a joke/travesty.

For well designed, stratified and representative surveys 2700 is actually pretty good sample size and will get you to +/- couple of percent points accuracy. There's a whole well studied sciencee behind "design of experiments" that goes into pretty much any R&D or market research effort. Nothing will save you however if you don't design and administer the research well.

If you don't believe this and know a bit of programming, simply whip up a Monte Carlo program to repeatedly randomly sample 2700 without replacement from a dataset of 10 million a few thousand times, measure and histogram your estimtes and see the range where you end up most of the time. I actually do this when teaching introductory stats to new analysts and market researchers because seeing is the first step to understanding :-)

To bring it back to the anglosphere, I predict mass anger towards the hobbling of social media companies by Western governments if it occurs. We have all these conversations amongst ourselves about the evils of these communication facilitating companies, often with good reason. But we should be cognizant that only the squeaky wheels are squeaking and the general public is happy with their communication platforms. Take the elitist approach of telling them what's good for them and affect their uses and the tides will turn. Not in mass media or on sites like this one, but groundswells of annoyed yet still mostly silent masses will make conscious decisions where they can and elitists will not understand what happened.

Uganda would be considered within the Anglosphere but not "core Anglosphere". It may not of been the most common use of the word before but Breixteers are trying to convince people that these countries will replace the trade they are stopping with the rest of Europe so will take as many as they can. I not sure if follow but you mention that the general public is happy and that is surely the issue. If the populous were made aware of the implications of what they agree to on most of these sites/messaging services, owned and controlled by "elites", there would be action. It's difficult to explain to people so that they are convinced. The general assumption is that if it is as bad as is being reported it would not of been allowed in the first place.

> you mention that the general public is happy and that is surely the issue

An issue to you maybe, but some people just don't value their privacy as much.

> The general assumption is that if it is as bad as is being reported it would not of been allowed in the first place

I don't think this is true as is evident by the lack of public outcry/exodus. We shouldn't confuse the media narrative or the scandals as public outcry.

Many people just don't care that much. It's not your job to convince them because the opinion is ideological/subjective. It seems that many here think that if people don't see these often-voluntarily-provided privacy incursions as problematic, it is wrong and due to not being convinced properly or lack of education or whatever. In reality, people probably don't care (can't say for sure, I'm not one) because in the grand scheme of things, these problems are minimal.

I'm concerned from the perspective of VPN usage that I've seen happen during social media blockades. People invariably turn to free VPN services. Suddenly people are walking around with known malware injectors, and the worst of the worst behaved VPN provider apps giving them "protected" browsing because they don't know any better.

An app developer without ethics could probably create some template for generating apps and sites for "free" VPN services, and liaise with the government to create a perfect cycle of people using apps that spy on them. And people would still probably fall for it.

I wonder what is more taxing - (A) Government's social media tax or (B) One's daily time spent on these social media platforms

For me it is definitely (B). I keep off Facebook but once in a while I get into it because an email appears "XYZ posted a new photo". Tempted to see the photo, I logon to Facebook and then I lose control - I surf through the endless news feed clicking those click bait headlines and funny videos. And an hour or more just flies by. Just like that I lost my time and some of my energy. Fortunately I am able to resist the temptation to comment on FB stuff.

"Africa is poor because she is not free" - George Ayittey

Not sure if it’s related but Facebook is building fiber backhaul for Uganda.

https://code.fb.com/connectivity/airtel-and-bcs-with-support...

Depending on how they did this, this could be an interesting experiment on the possibility of kerbing people's "screen" addiction. At least it looks like they are whitelisting some "social value add" sites, but taxing other less necessary sites.

If let's say they allowed X-time free after which you had to pay this tax and that climbed such that it served as a deterrent against too much unproductive screen time, it might provide some data for some behavioralists to study and reach some conclusions which are lacking.

> reach some conclusions which are lacking.

This is strong premise. I don't think we need more data when you have studies that show that social media as the same effect as cocaine. We specially don't need another tax.

If aspects of it have the same addictive effects as cocaine, why not tax it like other vices but in this case use the revenue to address the problems which surface.

I’m saying if they are going to do this, let’s do it again n a fashion such that we might glean useful information which could benefit all users.

>why not tax it like other vices but in this case use the revenue to address the problems which surface.

What problem?

There are also studies that say the same thing about Oreos

And they're right. Sugar highly addictive.

Is there a term for the confusing use of comma in headlines like that?

I noticed it initially in USA print newspapers but it seems to be propagating over the Web.

It is no more efficient than using an ampersand.

In this case I wondered how "mobile money" and "social media tax" were related.

In print journalism, it's common to use a comma in headlines that way. The comma is more efficient than an ampersand because it is less wide in variable width fonts.

Url changed from https://gizmodo.com/uganda-goes-through-with-social-media-ta..., which points to this.

If all governments do that, it will instantly raise humanity’s iq and eq up a notch and help govt get money too.

Social media has destroyed humanity. Turned everyone into attention deficit zombies.

Honestly, all censorship and free speech ideas aside, I wonder if a small socia media tax could be net positive on American society? Especially in terms of relieving diminished attention spans, etc.

I have decreased my own personal usage by adding a "time tax" — I always log out after a brief session on Twitter/Facebook/etc. I also use 2FA everywhere so there's extra friction in logging back in. That extra 30 seconds of effort can be enough to say "nah, I don't need to check Twitter twice today".

You can use things productively, or you can use things unproductively. This includes social media and Twitter. I have spent some time cleaning out so the only people I follow on Twitter post extremely valuable content. I block with extreme prejudice and will unfollow if they stop posting useful info.

Please stop posting unsubstantive comments here.

I agree. Kids at school using social media in class should be fined. I have since many years been out of FB, Instagram and Twitter. I don’t miss it a second. My kids is growing up without FB. I block it and other social media sites on a DNS-level.

Although implementation may be ugly and/ or shocking - the concept in itself has interesting roots.

Although social media in itself is vital - we are seeing more usage of it correlates with negative behavior pattern (as is excessive tv watching).

Should govt intervene?

They do intervene for substance addiction...

Government intervention and regulation of substance use has always been motivated by a much deeper agenda, generally economic in one way or another. The idea of taxing speech makes me uneasy.

If you watched people spending time with their friends, you could probably see the same patterns. Most human behavior is not productive. It's been that way for a long time.

People spending time with their friends is not productive?

Not any less than spending time on social media or games.

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