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[p_xavier]

Can the US and state governments tax products that are made in other countries and are then sent here?

Well Canada sure does!

 

[Zoned]

Can the US and state governments tax products that are made in other countries and are then sent here?

There isn't any specific way to define cloud these days. Good luck with enforcing tax on it.

 

[terrisus]

There isn't any specific way to define cloud these days. Good luck with enforcing tax on it.

The comment I was replying to there was specifically about "Netflix" rather than the nebulous (hah) "cloud" in general.

 

[Jacksinthe]

Taxing email would be great! Imagine a $.01/email tax:

• Spam suddenly has a real cost for the sender! AND to pay the tax you would create a paper trail back to the sender. Win/Win.
• Junk mail even from reputable services now has a cost, just like a paper mass mailing
• Businesses would discover maybe they shouldn't cc:ALL on every email, perhaps they would be a little more judicious with email in general
• And yet for any individual person, it wouldn't cost much. I'm sure most people don't even send 1000 personal emails a year, which would only be $10

The problem with email now is that it is "free", and no one values a free service.

Who gets spam anymore with gmail? Seriously? Is this still a problem for people in 2015?

Also, fuck Chicago. This place sucks ass for everything but the pizza and the skyline. I love this city but the politicians that have been running it are garbage. Same goes for Illinois.

 

[RiccochetJ]

Can the US and state governments tax products that are made in other countries and are then sent here?

You mean tariffs?

 

[terrisus]

You mean tariffs?

It was a rhetorical question, but yes.

 

[Bry0]

Who gets spam anymore with gmail? Seriously? Is this still a problem for people in 2015?

Also, fuck Chicago. This place sucks ass for everything but the pizza and the skyline. I love this city but the politicians that have been running it are garbage. Same goes for Illinois.

Agreed, as much as I love hotdogs, deep dish pizza, and baseball, I can only take so much of this.

"This" applying to much more than taxes.

 

[RiccochetJ]

It was a rhetorical question, but yes.

Ya, I know. I was trying to wrap my head around how Chicago would go about enforcing this digital tariff and how it could be abused.

 

[Syriel]

Can someone clue me in on this part -

If Netflix doesn't have servers there in Chicago, right - how can Chicago get taxes from them? I mean, sure, you can say "hey, you now have to pay us taxes". But how can they enforce that? Are they going to go to NetflixCentral and go in and be all "Give us the money or we'll....." well, I mean really, what can they do? Cut off everyones internet? Force internet providers to wall off Netflix? What options does Chicago have to actually enforce this?

Netflix has servers everywhere.

Netflix uses AWS for its primary servers (which is why when AWS went down over the holidays a few years back, Netflix also went down), but it also offers server racks for free to any ISP that wants them so they can be hosted locally.

AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/
Open Connect: https://openconnect.netflix.com/

The OC servers don't host the entire library, but they do host the most popular content for that specific node. Think of it as a local caching server.

If your ISP has OC servers installed, you're going to see better performance.

Since those servers are all Netflix owned and maintained, they could probably be used to declare a "physical presence" in the local area.

 

[Bry0]

Ya, I know. I was trying to wrap my head around how Chicago would go about enforcing this digital tariff and how it could be abused.

Promise that whoever brings in the most revenue from the tax gets a seat alongside Rahm.
Huehue

 

[Darksol]

Let the bears pay the bear tax, I pay the Homer tax.

 

[thefro]

Chicago's got a major internet hub there (in the Hancock building, IIRC), so it'll take a while for companies to make alternate arrangements.

 

[terrisus]

Let the bears pay the bear tax, I pay the Homer tax.

 

[glow]

Eh, so many our products are digital now, and their delivery is digital.

Seems to me otherwise it's the same idea as adding tax to the purchase or rental of a physical book or a DVD. But then I forgot how anti-tax the internet generation is .

It's got nothing to do with the tax itself but the fact that it only applies to Chi and not the whole state. This whole cloud tax thing reeks of Rahm bowing to Rauner, probably in exchange for some shady deal we'll never know about.

 

[RedToad64]

I don't understand how you can tax cloud services. Most of them are free... and...
I'm not going to bother making sense of this.

 

[HammerOfThor]

Let the bears pay the bear tax, I pay the Homer tax.

I like this idea. Tax the Bears and Cubs a "loser" tax every time they lose. May then they will actually start to win...

 

[Sober]

The biggest effect at the moment I can see is that Chicago just hung a sign saying any Cloud Provider service is not welcome.

Any server farm will undoubtedly immediately relocate.

Wouldn't even be surprised if the people proposing this didn't know the cloud is not actually a cloud.

 

[krae_man]

Well Canada sure does!

Sometimes. Seriously, I don't understand how a package properly labeled with a value over the tax free threshold ever goes through untaxed.

 

[Bry0]

I like this idea. Tax the Bears and Cubs a "loser" tax every time they lose. May then they will actually start to win...

Nah, Cubs will have to call it quits after a season.

 

[minor effort]

"electronically delivered amusements" sounds like your shitty garage band from middle school

We do a lot of Radiohead covers.

 

[DonasaurusRex]

Surprised they haven't started taxing emails.

just cut the crap and tax my data frames /hr so we can be sure that some sneaky new protocol or network config isn't cheating the city out of their rightful share of 1's and 0's over a transmission medium....

 

[lobdale]

Threads like this make installing that cloud-to-butt plugin so worth it.

 

[Dalek]

What a spectacularly stupid idea. I can almost guarantee the chuckleheads that came up with this idea couldn't even explain cloud computing to you.

 

[Ether_Snake]

Taxes should be used to orient the economy, such as ny discouraging smoking, fast food consumption, not using public transportation, luxury purchases, reducing speculation in real estate, etc., not be a random cash grab.

 

[TSM]

Net neutrality gained some footing so the obvious next step is to selectively tax portions of the data as determined by politicians.

 

[NYCmetsfan]

Net neutrality gained some footing so the obvious next step is to selectively tax portions of the data as determined by politicians.

They're not taxing data, they're taxing monetary transactions. This has nothing to do with net neutrality

"I could do that same activity of research using books or periodicals without being taxed," Wynne says. "So it does seem like I'm being picked on because I chose to do it online."

This seems obviously silly.

He's being taxed on those books and periodicals when he purchases them.

 

[exmachina64]

The country simply needs to pass a basic internet sales tax and give brick and mortars a fair shot again.

There's no system in place for distributing those taxes to the relevant state, municipal and county governments and I imagine it wouldn't be popular to create one.