by Leon K

Created on: December 25, 2008

Regardless of the happenings and future plans or prospects to indirectly or directly tax the population for inter access, the question remains, "Should we be taxed for using the internet?" Well undoubtedly as an internet user and a frequent internet user, I would have to answer a down-right No!

Before you are able to log onto the internet you require obviously a computer with internet capabilities, which is pretty much every home P.C. in the world. Once your computer has the capability to connect to the various arrays of servers in this virtual universe there is a catch, and that catch is that you need to subscribe to a service which will provide you with the high speed access.

What is not understood by most internet users in the world is that the internet provider is not the internet. What they are doing is allowing you to use the lines in which the data is transferred as they are either owned directly by that company or are being subsidised to another company which is forced to pay another usage fee to the owners of those lines in any form.

Your computers already have the ability to connect to the array of servers out there to access you information, however the current system requires an internet subscription. So in reality this subscription is not only the "tax" that we pay but it is also taxed governmentally in the form of Goods and services, or as goes in my country.

You would at this point be thinking, "Well why do we need to pay this money to access the internet? It's an outrage!" Well in fact it is not, the question should in fact be, "Why must we pay ridiculous amounts to gain internet access?

To just give everyone a dose of reality, in order to be able to have so many websites on the internet and to support the extremely large amount of users in this day and age logging on we need to have set up very strong servers. These servers in fact do need to be maintained and monitored, which requires human intervention.

Even though the fees per internet user would outweigh the costs, we still find ourselves paying for internet connections which have limitations. It is in my opinion that we are already being taxed for using the internet, however it is not a governmental tax, it is mainly profit.

There are already systems in place by websites who sell goods to add tax to taxable items, so if you were to buy something from Australia for example, you would be charged the item price plus the GST (Goods and services tax). This applies to internet sales and physical sales.

I believe the immediate question that would have rise from the readers would be more of whether the Government should be taxing internet usage, and once again I would say no! There is no justification for the government to be able to tax internet usage and especially being separate entity to the private sector it is highly doubtful that such a proposition would even be thought up.

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