Well, it is.

The tax that is being levied is being levied on people who have a phone line, not people who have broadband. It is being levied equally on each individual, which is what makes it a poll tax.

It's extreme to worry about a 50p surcharge, yes: but all I'm saying is there are better ways to do this. Less politically palatable ways, but better ways.

Yes, of course. Someone could be earning £50k a year but have three children at university, and would therefore have less disposable income than someone with no kids on £25k a year. But the general correlation is that the more money you have, the more disposable income you have.

In my view progressive taxation doesn't start with the people who earn £50k a year though; it starts with the people who earn millions. I can see why people need £50k a year to live a nice life; I'm a bit sickened by people who earn millions and pay very little tax.

Yes, the need to earn a wage is a great motivator and any system should be designed in such a way that people are motivated. The UK benefits system is designed in this way, to a great extent - whatever certain newspapers would have us believe, it is very difficult to live off benefits for a long period of time unless you have a long-term disability. And the mount of money lost on "fake" benefit payments is nowhere near the amount lost in tax avoidance.

Anyway, this is now getting pretty off topic so I'm going to sign off. Night, all...

What?

I'm not sure where you live in the world, but in the UK it is very difficult to not go out to work - despite what some sections of the press would have us believe. Even long-term benefits like disability living allowance are being squeezed.

I am sure there are some people who don't want to go out to work, and play the system instead - but they are by far the minority. I don't see why it's any worse to not work and live off benefits than it is to inherit a huge amount of cash and live off that instead, while avoiding paying taxes by keeping your money off shore.

The rich shouldn't pay for my TV or my internet. To reiterate: I wouldn't benefit if this tax was levied progressively; I'd end up paying more, in all likelihood. That's fair, because I'm more able to pay such a tax than a lot of other people.

I'm confused as to why people always think that progressive taxes will take money out of their pay packets. Wealth distribution is massively skewed and any fair taxation system would tax the richest and leave the regular people alone.

Big companies have more employees, and are therefore going to get a bigger benefit, in total, than smaller companies.

And the point here is that this isn't a tax on broadband, but on phonelines - you pay whether you've got broadband or not.

It's a little confusing to introduce an "if you've got a phone line then you can pay an extra 50p" argument, or a "pay more tax if you use the internet more" argument. It's irrelevant. If you earn more money, you are better able to pay taxes. If you earn a "reasonable amount" then I doubt a progressive tax system would really effect you negatively. See http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=2 - wealth is massively skewed in the UK, as it is in most countries. Most regular folks would be better off under progressive taxation policies.

VAT is not a poll tax. If you buy more luxuries, you pay more VAT (it's dabatable whether items such as adults shoes and Tampax are luxuries, but that's the idea).

I kind of see you point about having an obligation to make things accessible to others if you have access to things, but that's not what's happening here: everyone in the UK will be charged an extra 50p for their landline, whether on not they have broadband or not.

And yes, of course we have income tax: but over the past few years income tax rates in the UK have not changed in proportion to the vast increases, and concentration, in wealth.

I don't disagree with any of this. I just think it should be applied across the board - if you are more able to pay taxes, you should be made to pay more taxes. The reason for this is as outlined in my earlier post: people who earn more do not necessarily work harder, and they are not necessarily more highly skilled. It's just a fluke of the system, and we can use taxes to iron that out. You don't seem to have disagreed explicitly with that assertion: you're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying "enough is enough". So I don't get accused of wanting subsidies, I should point out that in pretty much any progressive taxation system going I'd get absolutely screwed. I'm currently on the wrong end of an inheritance tax bill of over £150,000...

He he he... don't get me wrong, I think it's fine that we're taxed to pay for this - I just don't think the tax is being applied in the right way. As it stands, this system of revenue collection means that everyone will contribute equally to the upgrading of the UK's broadband network. There are at least two problems with this: (1) We don't all benefit equally from the improved quality broadband - people in urban areas already have quality broadband, for example; also, telecommuting will be easier, which will disproportionately benefit large companies. (2) People who are less able to pay this tax are being forced to pay it at the same rate as people who are more able to pay it.

Even though people with higher incomes are more likely to have broadband access? This just seems a crazy setup: people who are less able to pay the tax are being forced to pay at the same level as everyone else, and people who don't have any need for broadband but still want a phone line have to subsidise those of us who do want broadband! I'm afraid I subscribe to the old idea that capitalism is an imperfect system and a progressive tax regime - with the rich getting taxed more than the poor, because their richness is partly down to the luck of the draw rather than aptitude or application - can be used to iron it out.

Surely the problem here isn't that the UK government is trying to raise taxes to pay for something that has a massive social benefit, but that it's doing it via a poll tax? I pay as much towards this project as my millionaire friend and my grandmother who's on a small pension. Is it really that unfashionable to tax the rich?

If I had a penny for every time I've called an ISP's tech support and pretended I was using XP, just so they didn't hang up on me...

Me neither. I've come across this problem before - I teach people with disabilities basic IT skills, for a charity. We don't have much money so I sometimes use refurbished kit running Ubuntu. This usually works absolutely fine; the biggest problem is when another family member sees Ubuntu, gets confused, and tells my student that their computer is "wrong". I don't quite know where I stand on this. When I'm feeling charitable, I think it's just a problem of education. When I'm feeling less charitable, the attitude some people have towards Linux - "different" = "bad" - seems a little too close to some pretty nasty aspects of humanity. Not everyone with this lady's limited experience would have reacted like she did. Dell didn't help, but I'm guessing she was pretty closed-minded from the start.

Has anyone been able to clarify precisely why she couldn't connect to her ISP? Or what feature of MS Word she needed that wasn't available in OpenOffice? I agree that this story sounds pretty funny, but this lady could be trying to use an unsupported USB modem to connect to DSL. There might be some similar niggle with Word files being provided by her college. Neither of these things is the fault of Ubuntu or Linux, but nor is it the fault of a non-techy end user.