France has found a new way to again lead the world…in the wrong direction.
France has decided to begin layering the Internet with new taxes to replace the income lost because of a government ban on primetime television commercials. This old-world view does not reflect the coming, and largely current, state of the how the Internet is accessed. And while the reasoning of the French is interesting, the result is not much different than what’s happening across the U.S.
Mobile wireless access to broadband is rapidly growing, and is expected to continue to grow as “smart phones” become increasingly popular. (While there is no standard definition of a smart phone, essentially these are mobile devices that go well beyond a traditional phone and function as a mobile personal computer.)
But consumers will not just be surfing their favorite Websites while they are on the move, they will increasingly use their mobile devices to move through their day more easily. From:
- the use of global positioning systems (GPS), which interact with online maps to help people determine where they are going;
- to a way to pay at the point of purchase like a credit card;
- to being the key to the family car;
- to, hopefully (as we expressed support for last week) being a device through which various government services could be distributed.
All of these uses are being deployed or being tested.
And yet, even as a mobile device becomes more and more essential, some look to greater and greater opportunity to tax the use of these devices by laying on taxes to service access or applying a use tax or fee to the overall bill delivered to the consumer.
And these taxes have already increased to the point where they far outpace virtually any other industry tax in any state, including cigarettes.
While Congress extended the Internet access tax moratorium in the U.S., the ban was not made permanent and will expire in 2014, and it did not address application to mobile smart phones, even though the tax concerns are the same.
It is time for Congress to make clear that the continued rush to tax interstate communications of all sorts is out of control in the states, and that at the very least a “time out” from new taxes on wireless communication is necessary.
If the French want to fry their taxpayers, that’s their business. But the U.S. shouldn’t follow their unhealthy policies.