{"id":4036,"date":"2010-10-28T06:54:02","date_gmt":"2010-10-28T10:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=4036"},"modified":"2010-10-27T17:40:21","modified_gmt":"2010-10-27T21:40:21","slug":"a-taxing-proposal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=4036","title":{"rendered":"A taxing proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the CRTC’s hearing in Timmins<\/a> yesterday,\u00a0one of the companies\u00a0suggested imposing a tax on everyone’s internet access in order to fund\u00a0phone company\u00a0expansion into territories that are currently served only by competing independent service providers.<\/p>\n

That wasn’t how\u00a0it was\u00a0characterized, of course.\u00a0But here is how it went.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0CRTC’s Communications Monitoring Report<\/a> was interpretted\u00a0as saying that there are 700K households that have no broadband access. That number refers to households that aren’t within reach of DSL, cable or the fixed wireless access of reporting ISPs.<\/p>\n

This proposal would have the CRTC to create a subsidy pool of $700M per year (for 10 years), that would be given only to incumbent phone companies to fund extending the reach of their networks. That is $1000 per year per potential new subscriber. (I use the term “potential” because, even\u00a0in urban areas, we still don’t have 100% penetration.)<\/p>\n

That is an eye-popping $10,000 per household transfer of wealth, without any consideration given\u00a0to the ability to pay the tax or the need to receive the largesse.<\/p>\n

And under the proposal, the $700M is going to be generated from a new tax on internet services – services that are currently exempt from funding universal phone service. It will work out to a tax of at least\u00a01.7%\u00a0– roughly 75 cents to a dollar per month –\u00a0for those of us subscribing to mainstream broadband plans.<\/p>\n

What impact will this have on broadband penetration among marginal income\u00a0households in urban centres? We know that there is an enormous digital divide based on household income, as Statistics Canada reported<\/a> in May: 94% of households\u00a0in the top income quartile\u00a0(over $85,000) have broadband service compared to only 56% penetration in the quarter of Canadians that have household\u00a0\u00a0income less than $30,000. So, more than 10% of Canadians – 44% of those in the lowest income\u00a0quartile – aren’t subscribing already.<\/p>\n

I don’t see how\u00a0broadband adoption will improve by raising prices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the CRTC’s hearing in Timmins yesterday,\u00a0one of the companies\u00a0suggested imposing a tax on everyone’s internet access in order to fund\u00a0phone company\u00a0expansion into territories that are currently served only by competing independent service providers. That wasn’t how\u00a0it was\u00a0characterized, of course.\u00a0But here is how it went. The\u00a0CRTC’s Communications Monitoring Report was interpretted\u00a0as saying that there are …<\/p>\n

A taxing proposal<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","two_page_speed":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nA taxing proposal • Telecom Trends<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"At the CRTC's hearing in Timmins yesterday,\u00a0one of the companies\u00a0suggested imposing a tax on everyone's internet access in order to fund\u00a0phone • October 28, 2010\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=4036\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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That wasn’t how\u00a0it was\u00a0characterized, of course.\u00a0But here is how it went. The\u00a0CRTC’s Communications Monitoring Report was interpretted\u00a0as saying that there are…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}