Get Ready for Repression Here (Score 1)

The issue of whether the states add some piddling amount to each purchase doesn't matter too much to me.

What is important is the amount of surveillance and repression needed to enforce anything like a net-tax now that the net is becoming a significant fraction of commerce.

The "old world" is based on situation where transactions between individuals could be differentiated from transactions between individuals and businesses. Basically, garage sales and such were ignored by the system since they couldn't amount to much. The internet world lumps everything together. Since the internet cuts out the middle man, like a garage sale, it cuts the difference between a business and an individuals.

Individuals will continue to not pay taxes on person-to-person transactions.

If the government winks at this, the speed of the internet would allow this kind of activity to start involving billions of dollars quite quickly.

If the government attempts to reign this individual activity in, it will create an enforcement that dwarfs the drug-repression monster.

So, sooner or later, we will the latter, tax enforcement involving things like massive search engines, artificial intelligence (with all the natural stupidity that this involves), and seize-first-ask-questions-later approaches.

Basically, this is going to come once the government sees the net as "mature." Mature meaning that the market has been divided up into fixed number of big fish who will then be happy to let the little fish be trampled.

So, our task is to see that the internet never reaches this magic maturity, see to it that technologies like gnutella and freenet are supplemented by dispersed E-commerce efforts.

Get on it boys and girls, Joe