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Comment by dzhiurgis | Hacker News Reader

I think the only thing surprising about this is that it happened sooner than later. Eventually we will see more states imposing taxes on information.

In a sense, if they gave you free education and you used that education to create new information, then they own a certain stake in it.

Just like sales tax is used to subsidise or oversee certain business, data tax will be used fund cyber policing, censorship and such. Also, it may ensure that we don't drown ourselves into pointless data. Just like businesses are forced to engage in certain activities (typically innovative) that can generate certain markup for the whole system to be sustainable.

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>In a sense, if they gave you free education and you used that education to create new information, then they own a certain stake in it.

What?! Does that mean the local water company owns a stake as well? I mean, I couldn't have possibly survived to receive that education without a source of clean water, right?

And what about the people who didn't receive a state-supported education (ie, private schools and home schooling). Are they exempt from this tax of yours?

Not only that, they took a lot of money in exchange for that "free" eduction -- often from people who didn't even use the service. So no, they don't have a "stake" in the products of anyone's mind. That's repugnant.

It is and I am not arguing for it, just merely accepting it and looking from the point of view the government thinks.

What government are you talking about? Does "free" education implies the obligation to give all your life work output to the government? This seems very foreign, please name at least one country that implements those ideas.

I was merely speculating, but I think Hungary might set the precedent.

Alternatively, whenever you buy storage media (DVD-R, HDD) there is a surcharge that goes to authors. That's all done on the premise that this media will be used for piracy.

You already pay tax on information when you watch Netflix or licence a patent.

Also I did not say give it all to government.

Well you paid for your water directly.

I did not say this is fair for anyone.

But information isn't a taxable item, since it's not a monetary amount. It would be like taxing electricity. You can tax the money you pay for it, but not the information itself.

You're not using your education to generate data. Most of the data is made by other people's education and then multiplied many times. Even for cases where you do create information, like in your comment, many magnitudes more data was sent over your line to get it before my eyes. If they wanted to tax new information, they wouldn't do it through a flat fee per GB.

Sales tax is a tax on a monetary exchange. You tax the price you pay for your shoes, you don't tax "$3 per shoe". The point of that is taxing value rather than quantity. How you use the tax money it is irrelevant to how you acquire it.

And last but not least: we're already drowning in 'pointless data'. A lot of the internet's capacity is used to transfer scripts and styles rather than real information. Whether you consider that pointless is a different matter, but it's not up to the government to say what you should consider pointless data and what you shouldn't.

> like taxing electricity

Carbon credits?

Carbon credits are a sale of "carbon capacity" for money, again here the money is taxed, not the credits themselves.

Ok you are right, most taxes are based on value, although alcohol and tobacco is taxed by unit. One could probably argue that certain information falls into this category.

that's an interesting point. I didn't consider excises. Those are usually levied on products that harm the user or the environment in some way, though. I doubt you can argue that internet data harms the planet :p

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