Re: [hackathon] One Tax API Hackathon proposal

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

Well there is this.

Congress Considers A Tax On Email (April Fool's Day Edition) (forbes.com)
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2015/04/01/with-deficit-not-going-anywhere-congress-considers-a-tax-on-email/?sh=1e42500816d3>

I suspect that at this point you will find that you run into the fact that
just because a government would like to tax something, that does not mean
collection of the tax is feasible.

In general, the IETF has been hostile to taxes and charges for use. The US,
or at least the part of the deep state that is interested, has also been
very much opposed to anything that might constrain communication.

A large number of governments have a monopoly tele communications provider
that has historically provided significant revenues from various telephone
charges. These fees have often been oppressive, $3/min for international
calls. And of course much of those fees have been diverted into the pockets
of corrupt government officials.

Governments have been proposing ways to claw back those fees for the past
25 years and the US and other countries have made sure those proposals go
precisely nowhere but the ITU provides a pretty good forum in which they
can go nowhere.

Sure, in the present Internet design, some functions like SMTP are
sufficiently visible to be able to tax use. But those functions have
increasingly been obscured by cryptography.




On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 1:45 PM Benson Muite <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Dear Phillip,
>
> Thanks for your feedback. OASIS ( https://www.oasis-open.org/ ) may be a
> good second step. Many countries at present are proposing flat taxes on
> digital goods, such as hosted email and cloud compute rental. What will
> the revenue collection agencies adopt to fulfill their missions in these
> cases? Will this be something that is developer friendly, efficient and
> secure? Can we make it easier by developing a prototype?
>