
Canada considering internet link tax - drchiu
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-heritage-minister-raises-possibility-of-link-tax-for-internet/
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igammarays
I can understand why Canada and almost any other country would be upset about
the huge rivers of money flowing out to a foreign tech company, but this tax
looks like it’ll just make things more expensive for the Canadian consumer. I
think a better way to protect Canadian interests would be to require that
personal data, servers, and support staff serving Canadian consumers be
located within the country.

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verdverm
What happens when every country you operate in wants this?

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tomatotomato37
If you're company is based in US/India/China you can just go "fuck it" and
only offer your services internally, and still becoming absolutely ludicrously
filthy rich because your home country is the size of a continent with
individual states/provinces producing more economic output than some old world
nations.

If you aren't based in an absurd world superpower than you just go bankrupt.

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verdverm
Kinda reminds me of this podcast / transcript about one person's ideas on the
coming geopolitical reorganization

[https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/post/charter-
cities-p...](https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/post/charter-cities-
podcast-episode-6-peter-zeihan)

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grawprog
Internet and service are already garbage here compared to nearly every where
else in the world. I've got two choices for home internet where I live and
'two' choices of phone company, both owned by the same parent company. I pay
twice as much for half as much data as most other places in the world. My
carrier subjects me to random throttling i've still to figure out entirely
what's affected and when after years, Canada's internet policies have favoured
big business for as long as they've existed with the consumers being
constantly screwed over.

To be honest, this has been going on longer than there's been internet with
phone and cable providers. This is just another push in the favour of big
businesses who can afford to pay over others who can't, while the government
takes its, generous, cut.

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donmcronald
> Facebook this week told the Australian regulator that removing Australian
> news content from its site would not materially affect its revenues, adding
> that it sent more than two billion clicks to Australian publishers in the
> first five months of 2020 worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

How do they get that? Is it based on what Facebook would charge an advertiser
for a click? I don’t know anything about it, but 2 billion clicks being worth
hundreds of millions of dollars doesn’t pass the smell test for me.

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moltar
Why not? The cheapest click you can get is $0.05, which is nearly impossible.
But let’s say it was possible, it’d be 100 million.

