Richard Stallman Asks: Should Big Tech Be Taxed For Hurting Society? (stallman.org) 191
Richard Stallman weighed in Friday on what he calls "massive commercial surveillance of individuals," saying that the two camps arguing about it "both miss the point." First there's the trustbusters who want to break Big Tech companies into smaller firms too small to eliminate their competition or exert undue influences on regulators. Then there's those who urge carefully-calibrated regulations to ensure tech companies always act in a way that's good for society.
RMS writes: By arguing about whether to divide up the power that this data gives to businesses, or to regulate the use of it (perhaps nationalizing it), they miss the point that both alternatives destroy our privacy and give the state a perfect basis for repression.
The danger is to collect that data at all.
More generally, I think the idea of taxing companies for the magnitude of harm that they do (regardless of whether they broke any rules to do it) is a good one.
RMS writes: By arguing about whether to divide up the power that this data gives to businesses, or to regulate the use of it (perhaps nationalizing it), they miss the point that both alternatives destroy our privacy and give the state a perfect basis for repression.
The danger is to collect that data at all.
More generally, I think the idea of taxing companies for the magnitude of harm that they do (regardless of whether they broke any rules to do it) is a good one.
Re: Interesting question (Score:2)
Define harm (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, if people are harmed then some form of compensation should put in place. If a society is harmed that should be in the form of regulation and taxes.
But first you need to quantify and prove the harm.
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Re: Define harm (Score:1)
Absolutely incorrect. Things that are against the law (like reckless discharge of a gun or punching someone) don't require harm to be done in most cases. Harm is not what decides if an action is illegal. In civil matters, however, the plaintiff must usually establish harm, which is unrelated to legality. This is called a tort.
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Your definition is wrong and fundamentally so. Laws are not an embodiment of morality, they are a means to ensure the power and influence of some groups. In some cases these groups comprise most of society, but that is rare. Sure, there are elaborate propaganda constructs that perpetuate the fantasy that the law serves the people, and many, many people fall for that. But it is in general not true and sometimes exactly the opposite.
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Taxes are for things that are not "wrong" in the eyes of the law. There are sin taxes, but those are for things that are merely discouraged. If we want to extract money for a (perceived) harm, that would be a fine or penalty.
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Taxes are for things that are not "wrong" in the eyes of the law.
No. Taxes are a lever the government has to enact policy gently. Laws are a level to enact policies by drawing a criminal line in the sand. They do the same thing in different ways and there are plenty of ways we tax things for harm that doesn't involve fines or penalties (e.g. carbon tax).
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You are aware that there is no "carbon tax" in the United States, right?
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You are aware that tax and the legal system is a political and economic concept that applies globally and is not something unique to the government of the United States, right?
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RMS is a US citizen, the companies in question are headquartered in the the US, and I think a large majority of Slashdot readers are from the US. If you want to argue that "we" need another GDPR-like law that helps the incumbent social media companies, while taxing them for the same things that GDPR regulates, issued by the same governments that already used the GDPR against the same kind of activities, you should just say that you think the GDPR was a mistake and that the EU should try again. And you sho
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Errr. Okay. Are you off your meds?
If you want to argue that "we" need another GDPR-like law
Huh? Are you US or EU? You're all about the USA and then talking about "another" GDPR like law? You don't have one.
you should just say that you think the GDPR was a mistake
It wasn't and I specifically split this out of the rest of your sentence because what you wrote wasn't coherent in any way shape or form, and that is why unicorns have horns instead of scales.
And you should avoid saying "we" if you mean to refer to a minority of the audience.
The only time I said we was in relation to government enaction of political theory. If you think democratic companies and concepts of tax are "minority" then ... look just
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Because the people and companies in this story are from the US, I supposed you wanted the US to enact a tax. I pointed out that, contrast to your claim, the US does not have a carbon tax, or in fact anything like one. You then stated that not all the world is the US. Did you not mean to suggest that the EU was the obvious place to implement such a tax? Africa, Asia, South America, Australia could not hope to make such a tax stick, which leaves the EU.
Go back to preschool, you have apparently not mastere
Re:Define harm (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem I see with trying to define data collected from Facebook and Google users as "harm" is that the data was given up willingly. For a contract to be valid, there has to be consideration [thefreedictionary.com] - both parties have to give up something of value to the other. In the case of big data, the user gave up their data in exchange for some service. Likewise, the company gave up that service in exchange for the data. Both sides gave and received consideration, making it a valid contract. (This is why you often hear that economics is not a zero-sum game. You can make a zero-sum exchange of goods and services, which are a net benefit to both parties. e.g. I have two water bottles, you have two hamburgers. If we are both hungry and thirsty, trading one water bottle for one hamburger results in a net benefit to both of us, even though the amount of physical goods between the two of us remains the same.)
While giving up something of value could in absolute terms be considered "harm", the fact that it was given up in exchange for something received, and the fact that the person made the exchange willingly constitutes evidence that in their own opinion the exchange was a net benefit to themselves, not harm. And the justification for any tax meant to counteract the harm goes out the window.
Contrast this to surveillance and data collection done without the user's knowledge or consent. In that case, the user is unwittingly giving up the data. And if they knew the data were being collected or disseminated they might decide the exchange was not a benefit to themselves, and decide not to make the deal. In that case, you can argue that harm is being done to the users. Such is the case for companies losing data to hackers due to their lax security.
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You buy still willingly, yet still pay sales tax on it. All we need to do is put a tax on the collection of personal data. We already have a pretty good definition of what that data is, thanks to decades of data protection laws (the latest iteration of which is the GDPR).
The goal is to adjust business models so that they avoid doing harm by minimizing their tax bill. Thus they will only collect data that is absolutely necessary for their business, and pay for their own regulation and oversight.
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Isn't there a whole galaxy of tort law already on the books?
It seems that any decent programmer would simply use the existing APIs.
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So everyone is not surveilled 24/7. But we all get $200 checks in recompense!
Extremist (Score:2)
But Some Surveillance Is Necessary
Only extremists talks in compromises!
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The crazy uncle of open source talking about compromise? I never saw that coming.
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The crazy uncle of open source talking about compromise? I never saw that coming.
Then you haven't been paying fucking attention. Or more like you have but only to batshit crazy forum posts as opposed to what RMS has actually said. He's actually pretty practical.
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He's actually pretty practical.
He even wrote about how it was actually ethical to sell exceptions to the GPL.
But his practicality is hidden in plain sight - the GPL works with copyright, and doesn't seek to overthrow it.
Re:But he is a socialist & Bernie Supporter (Score:5, Insightful)
"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have."
Sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson. But one thing he did say was:
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild, and government to gain ground."
That's what we're seeing now.
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Here's your "Trump free market":
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Re: But he is a socialist & Bernie Supporter (Score:3)
Get out of your myopic left/right ghetto. It's a false dichotomy.
St Richard is neither a leftist not a rightist. He stands tall for human freedom. No ugly partisan politics involved.
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Left wing loves big government and spying on people. Republicans are for us and the little man who represent individuals and the free market will take care of the problem.
You can't be a liberal yet support privacy? It just can't happen
Did you really have to drag politics into the discussion?
Christ, what an asshole.
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You can't be a liberal yet support privacy? It just can't happen
Spoken in jest, I hope. Come to Canada. The Liberals (liberals) and New Democrats (socialists) are the biggest supporters of privacy and individual freedoms while the Conservatives (conservatives) are for more police powers and surveillance.
You shall not stop data collection (Score:1)
I have the absolute right to sniff and store any and all traffic on my network. It is our responsibility as a society to ensure that the data is accessible to anybody and everybody so that nobody can gain the advantage.
Re: You shall not stop data collection (Score:1)
On your network. How much wiring do you own?
It reminds me of my 10base5 network that I fiddled around with in the 90's to learn some networking technology. I had four or five 3c503 boards and a pair of 3c505s. My network reached from the 50 ohm terminator on one end of the coax to the one at the other end. Your network is probably of a similar size, though the coax topology is now obsolete.
Data Collection Is Fine (Score:1)
sure (Score:2)
Tax Copyright Too! (Score:5, Interesting)
I got the idea from someone's Slashdot sig maybe around 2002 or so saying something like, "if it is intellectual property, shouldn't it be taxed"?
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net... [p2pfoundation.net]
What is the social justification for such a tax?
Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.
Copyrights were originally monopolies granted "for a limited time" with the notion that the costs they imposed on society would be repaid by the work moving into the public domain after that limited time. That bargain has effectively been broken because the terms are so long (and likely will be in perpetuity in the U.S.A. given the recent Supreme Court decision). Yet, copyrights still pose a cost on society. There must be courts to dispute them, police to enforce them. There must be prisons to hold the millions of copyright offenders. Like no one in the 1960s would imagine a million U.S. citizens behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s, it is possible that there may be a million U.S. citizens behind bars in the 2010s for copyright violations as the "War on Those Who Share" gets underway. There must be an information superhighway to transport these works, and standards for disseminating them. Authors of derivative works must spend time researching whether a work is already in the public domain, or locating all the related rights holders if it is not. Extensions of the principle of copyright to cover the ideas in the work such as characters or plot lines or other structures make it ever more costly to create new non-infringing works. Many new or derived works are not created because of these chilling effects, which is a hidden cost of copyrights. People in developing nations or others who cannot pay use fees for copyrighted works are deprived of education or enjoyment when such a deprivation does not directly benefit anyone. So, given all these indirect costs of granting copyright monopolies, society is justified in imposing a financial cost on copyright holders to rebalance the copyright bargain.
Real estate is typically taxed at a small percentage of an assessed value. If the taxes are not paid, the real estate essentially becomes owned by society. Note that these annual property taxes are in addition to any fees for recording deed transfers, liens, title searches, and such.
Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax payments.
This approach could include a digital archive of all copyrighted works. Essentially, upon initial registration of a self-assessed value, a rights holder would be required to send in a digital copy of the work. This copy would be used to determine rights holders for works by means of a digital search. Any work not in this database would be presumed public domain. If the annual tax were not paid, th
Re:Tax Copyright Too! (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting post.
>"Incidentally, this approach can be applied to patents as well, "
Of course, the approach could ALSO be made on having children. They pose a huge cost to society too- schools, police, social services, amber alerts, JV, AFDC, Medicaid. But instead, we do the exact opposite (discounts, tax writeoffs, etc) :)
Re: Tax Copyright Too! (Score:2)
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Not always. At the moment, this is turning round. Unfortunately, this is happening globally.
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>"Nature selects against societies that discourage child birth. It's only natural."
Only when the average goes below replacement. But few places are like that, and I believe we already have way more than enough people.
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Only when the average goes below replacement. But few places are like that,
That's not true, most of the first world is under replacement.....which means Europe and US and China will be replaced by cultures that do encourage reproduction.
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>"That's not true, most of the first world is under replacement....."
The entire first world is a drop in the bucket compared to the population of the second and third world combined. So that means very little on a global scale.
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Except that there are only about three third world countries left.
What countries do you consider second world? India and Indonesia and a few African ones?
The split between first world and the rest is probably 50:50 or even 60:40.
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>"What countries do you consider second world?"
India, China, Vietnam, most of Africa (that isn't third-world), quite a bit of central and south America. It is a lose term, for sure. Countries between first-world and third-world in which they have some or moderate technology and economy, but most of their population is poor or very poor.
>"The split between first world and the rest is probably 50:50 or even 60:40."
By population? Oh no, I don't think it is anywhere near that good.
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China is not second world, nor is most of South America.
We are not in the 1970s anymore, we have 2018, perhaps you did not notice.
Pun intended: if you consider China second world, then younreally should reevaluate your country. Before Obamacare it would have been second or even third world.
Why you included Vietnam in your list, is beyond me. Half of the countrie was bombed into the stone age, but now they are basically on first world level.
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Children are of immense benefit to society though, which is why we encourage them. Without enough children we will be be facing severe problems a few decades down the line.
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It's not really a copyright kind of issue, it's about the social harm that is done. For example, in Europe we have things like the right to be forgotten and regulators who oversee the use of personal data by businesses. They are not zero cost, those things have to be funded from general taxation.
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What is the social justification for such a tax?
Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.
This is a fig leaf, used to pretend that property taxes are something good.
In reality, all of these things can be paid for by taxes on income, or on wealth, or on transfers of money.
If you pierce the illusion that "property taxes are good", and examine the reality of how they work, you find lots of problems.
For example, there is a history of using property taxes as a tool to disenfranchise minorities - especially those who have land but don't have much income. Developers view this as an opportunity: they c
Not (Score:2)
at all.
the US Tax system is corrupt and broken (Score:5, Insightful)
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i think it would be fair and if i became rich i would not be exempt from it
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You ask why J.K. Rowling should pay more than others for the books she sold. Well, she benefited more than others from the fact that there are such things as people who can read, for one, which is something that is supported by the state. The more you have, the more
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Exactly the opposite.
Capitalism, or more precisely state corporatalizm as in the US, is the reason that e.g. south america and still parts of asia are relatively poor, or have a problem with the amount of poor people.
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What keeps people poor in south america is the CIA that disrupted plenty of democratic elections in countries like Chile, Peru, Columbia etc. So that big land owners could keep the populace as bond slaves to harvest fruits for american companies like General Fruits.
You are a moron, not knowing anything ahout american history.
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Re: the US Tax system is corrupt and broken (Score:1)
Can there be ice cream, too? I really like ice cream.
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Congratulations, you've just invented the progressive "flat" income tax. Where shall we mail your Certificate of Achievement?
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the IRS should be abolished and a flat tax with a graph that gets steeper
That's not a flat tax [wikipedia.org], it's a progressive tax [wikipedia.org]
Also, what is your plan for how to collect the taxes after you've abolished the IRS?
At first glance, feels like a losing thought (Score:2)
Of course, given the general gelatinous and complacent apathy that's been afflicting the masses as of late, this doesn't have much of a chance of happening.
But given the tools we
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And just how to? (Score:4, Insightful)
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milliHitlers
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hurtz....harming millions would be quantified in megahurtz....
LOL
typical leftist with kleptocratic tendencies (Score:1)
You can always count on left-leaning "progressives" to come up with another excuse to steal money from one person (probably a reasonably responsible and productive generally well-behaved person) and give it to another person (usually an incompetent, lazy, dysfunctional, malevolent, or self-medicating person). These megalomaniacal kleptocratic types also suffer from delusions of grandeur that they are somehow qualified to use the power of government and its ability to commit armed robbery to "tax" society in
Harm to Society, says the author of emacs (Score:2)
Not taxed (Score:2)
LOL at the best the company hired for their skills to do security that big governments collect on:
The very best who could not imagine, protect against, discover, detect, speak out.
Government spies deep in secure networks gathering all data for years who went totally undetected by the top "experts".
Staff without the education to understand "someone" was getting to all the brands data.
Why where they hired on merit if outside gov networks could just export plain text data everyday from big br
Now try to define "Harm" (Score:3)
In a way that won't be abused to further OTHER forms of oppression, or isn't easily circumvented through legal or linquistic trickery.
Sure, everyone knows what harm FEELS like, but actually defining it for a legal framework is dangerous in the extreme.
Mainly due to all the special interests and the various axes they have to grind...
Government harm (Score:1)
fifty cent army (Score:2)
As expected, the fifty cent army is out in force for this one! I guess this proposal, coming from a renowned defender of liberty like St Richard, must have Facebook & Google really spooked.
Watch the shills make all sorts of disingenuous arguments. Especially amusing is when they ape libertarian arguments, in defense of actions that trample liberty. And watch the foul mouthed forum disruption trolls as they hurl childish insults, in a flatulent effort to drive down the level of conversation.
St Richard,
When did rms discover money? (Score:3)
About 15 years ago rms and I actually exchanged some email. I dared to suggest that financial models actually mattered. On one hand, he convinced me that he could not care less about money, but on the other hand he did ask a rather insightful question that contributed quite a bit to my ideas for the Charity Share Brokerage. Doesn't exist yet, but among other applications it could help improve Slashdot and provide alternative funding for better journalism. Don't hold your breath, eh?
As regards his latest comments, he's about 1/3 of the way to reality now. I really think the reason he can't make more progress is because he has such a weak grasp of what freedom actually means. Corporate taxation certainly should consider harms, but the most important harm is obviously the destruction of freedom.
In phase one, the cure involves getting the soulless corporations out of politics. They need to stop bribing the cheapest politicians to help maximize their profits. Fake problem because there is NO solution. No amount of money will satisfy the problem of insufficient profit.
In phase two, taxation should be used to increase freedom. I think the most promising solution approach would be progressive taxes on corporate taxes based on market share. The goal is to make sure that every market has enough players to offer real choice. (Cf my sig.) It is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an inducement to reproduce by fission so excessively successful corporation becomes at least two competing corporations.
Caveat: There sometimes are natural monopolies that are going to wind up with overwhelming market shares. In such cases the higher tax rates are justified by (1) The cost of carefully regulating to monopoly to prevent abuse of the monopoly position, and (2) Research and even investment into ways to break the monopoly. If you can provide an example of a natural monopoly that lasted more than 50 years, please share it, because I know of none such, though I know of many examples of monopolies, natural and unnatural, that tried really hard to protect themselves as long as possible.
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I think the most promising solution approach would be progressive taxes on corporate taxes based on market share.
Interesting idea. In general I'm opposed to all corporate income taxes. Their primary effect is to tax individuals in a way that hides the bill from the voters, making it hard for them to evaluate their return on the taxes they pay. However, I think taxes are a useful tool for internalizing externalities so that the market can factor them in, including at the corporate level.
One challenge is quantifying the social cost of monopolies. Obviously, any specific rate schedule you choose and publish will be
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I think I can address most of your questions and concerns by clarifying freedom, which calls for my full sig, not the truncated version that I'm forced to use on Slashdot. Here it is:
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
(Actually, the != should be a true not-equal sign, but here on Slashdot my only other option is <>. I still don't understand why the HTML commands like ≠ or ≠ or ≠ don't work here. Of course Unicode support wo
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If you can provide a cohesive philosophic explanation of how tax-related things are working now, I would greatly respect you for it.
If you're looking for consistent, cohesive philosophy behind any element of the legal code, especially tax law, you're going to be disappointed. Laws are built from compromises between parties with different visions and philosophies.
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I think you're making a "Don't look at how the sausage is made" argument, and of course I have to acknowledge what a mess it is. No surprises or disappointment there.
What I am saying is that reasons matter. Reasons that you can openly discuss in public have certain advantages over secret reasons that may be revealed or exposed. The rationales given for last year's tax scam are obviously completely bogus, but the results are making them increasingly obvious to anyone who cares to look. Unfortunately, one of
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I think you're making a "Don't look at how the sausage is made" argument
Not really. You asked about the philosophy underlying the existing tax code, and I'm arguing that there is no such thing. There are many competing visions, all partially expressed, plus many rationales that don't qualify for the term "vision" because they're just tweaks made to favor some group or other, for purely political reasons.
This isn't to say that reasons don't matter, or to say that no attempt should be made to define an overarching philosophy with supporting rationale, and to reorganize the cod
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Actually, I can answer that question easily, and if you've read some of my other comments, you should have seen most of the key elements of the answer already. I would actually prefer to frame it in terms of political philosophy, though I haven't read enough of your comments to know where your own political philosophy is, so I may not present it in the clearest way to be seen from your current perspective.
Background: Capitalism is dead. Communism is a fantasy that was never even alive. Socialism is an amusi
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I hope you don't mind that I wanted to preserve a copy of this branch in my journal. Your provocative response is important, but if you object, then I can nuke the journal entry, though I think my reply will make less sense without your reply in the middle.
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Metrics? (Score:2)
There's no objective measure of how much harm companies do by trading on your privacy. Who is RMS going to appoint to make the arbitrary decision, and who's going to pay him off to make the whole scheme pointless? Or more pointless than it already is?
Paging Mr. Heinlein (Score:2)
Growing up I had a tiny lib
Govt is already doing it (Score:1)
aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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companies will just have to sell our data to even more people.
Economics doesn't work that way. If the companies could be making more money by charging more THEY WOULD ALREADY BE DOING IT. Companies set prices to optimize profitability, not to make "just enough" to stay in business.
Also, Google, Facebook, etc. don't sell customer data. They sell advertisements, and use customer data to improve the effectiveness of the ads.
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Re: Slashdot Answers! (Score:3)
Re: Slashdot Answers! (Score:4, Insightful)
Greed is a very admirable quality when it leads to you being warm and well fed and alive. People in the West are spoiled beyond their imagination to cope with reality.
Re: Slashdot Answers! (Score:1)
I keep hearing people say that, but it's kinda bullshit. Maybe YOUR friends and family are rich and spoiled. Well I come from a poor background, that I was lucky enough to escape. I've been all around the world. Yes, there are indeed some almighty shitholes out there. But most global poverty is not particularly worse than American poverty.
The idea that America is just sooooo damned rich is total horseshit. Nothing but domestic propaganda. Huge parts of America are desperately poor, and there's lots of reall
Re: Slashdot Answers! (Score:2)
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Stallman is an irrelevant, whiny communist (Score:1)
Inventing GNU was a good contribution to civilization. For that Stallman deserves legitimate credit.
But ever since then all he's done is spout banal pronouncements about politics and economics (which he knows virtually nothing about).
Thankfully, in the real world (outside the FOSS bubble), nobody knows who Stallman is, let alone cares about his political opinions.
Re:Stallman is an irrelevant, whiny communist (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: HELL, NO! (Score:1)
Be careful, because poor ghetto kids may drop a cinder block on your Telsa from the overpass.
It might mar your paint job.
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> Say it with me, hard-working, successful people: "FUCK YOU, POORS!"
Damn straight. I spent my entire adult life getting away from that crap while they sat on their lazy asses. Nobody owes you anything.