Sorry no links, I read about it in a real newspaper.

Today I saw some small snippet of some local politician or journalist suggesting a tax on internet traffic. One argument for it seemed to be that more traffic means more servers needed, which means more electricity used, which means the dolphins and whales of Amazon will face a horrible death. Since the politicians here love taxes, I'm sure this will be implemented at some point, and probably the local RIAA (Teosto, Gramex, whatever...) will get their own cut from all local internet traffic as well.

I'm amazed why I never thought someone would suggest that at some point, in fact it is amazing such tax isn't already in place here (and rest of the EU). I don't know if such tax is already present somewhere in the world.

I knew flatrate internet, especially for mobile broadband, would be too good to be true in the long run...

EDIT: Now that I am connecting the dots, the suggestion probably came from some newspaper journalist who is miffed that now they are putting tax on subscription (paper) newspapers here, or something like that. "Hey, why no similar tax on internet newspapers and sites as well, then? Not fair!".

Expect that, and worse once the principle is acquired.

Income tax was introduced during a crisis, at 2 or 3% rates, in most countries.
Value added tax was introduced as a replacement to stamp taxes. Stamp taxes later returned as ecological contributions , recycling duties etc.

Now on the issue of internet, there is a whole debate here in Belgium about a levy on internet traffic to compensate for digital rights. Whatever the use of your connection that is.

In fact for these b.....ds, everything is pretext. Ecology is a pretext - even if the issue is serious, but green multi-staged taxes on consumers and free rights to polute awarded to strategical entreprises isn't the way to go - , crisis is a pretext - work longer, for less, more years, paying more for your retirement to get less pension, so that other "very important expenditure" is not impacted etc.

Hmm dosnt sound good. Last thing we need is another tax in these hard times :*(

Not sure if this is similar but I read in a Polish news site that they were thinking of slapping people with a tax that is something like the TV tax ("abonament") that we have here just to gt more money out of people.

Well, on this side of the pond, we have a general consumption tax, value added tax. 21% in my country. on internet connections too. And providers pay licences to the state. Hence an expensive internet for consumers.

What is discussed is
- taxes on use of download/upload volume
- taxes on use of research engines
- taxes on carbon footprint

It looks like something proposed by my avatar ;-/

French / Belgian / Scandiniavian version of "I have a cow"

"I have two cows. The state subsidies a third. I have to sell two of them to pay the taxes "

Gotta wonder: what would this do to open wi-fi?

I suppose we already know the answer to that: many places would clamp down their currently open and free connections, and institute some mechanism for logging in and charging for the service.

Netflix and other streaming services would take a big hit, people would start blocking more and more graphical content as they surf, youtube would go pay-to-host or maybe even pay-to-view. Usage monitoring will become a growth industry, while not actually creating a product.

I honestly don't see how someone can think this is an argument. Servers are not operated by the government. They don't produce electricity. Those who produce electricity probably pay a tax on emissions. So, according to this reasoning, this tax would have to be raised.

Of course, the increased costs would be passed on to the customers and in the end nothing changes. I'm just shocked what passes for an argument these days...