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When you eat at a restaurant do you see property tax on the bill? It is a cost of doing business, everyone has them.
by lokar 3y ago
When you eat at a restaurant do you see property tax on the bill? It is a cost of doing business, everyone has them.
- tptacek 3y agoWhen I eat at a restaurant, that business is not paying a per-seating fee to the city it's sited in. But that's what the ISPs are doing.
- lokar 3y agoWhy does that matter?
- tptacek 3y agoBecause property taxes are a predictable, fixed fee, and ISP fees are usage taxes applied per-customer. Let's make this imaginary restaurant more fun: not only is it required to charge a per-seating fee, but it's not the same fee for each customer. Instead, they have to inquire about the residential address of each guest, and compute a locality-specific seating fee.
- woobar 3y agoIsn't fee based on location of where the service is provided? My ISP at the rental property doesn't care about my residential address. They only care about the address where their service is consumed. You can stop worrying about that restaurant, they will charge same fee all their customers as long as they don't deliver.
- tptacek 3y agoThis is about labeling requirements at the point of sale, not about about the details of your bill, which already list these fees.
- tekknik 3y agoThis is not necessarily true for all businesses in all locals. For instance if you buy a car in CA, they charge sales tax based on your home address, so two people could in fact buy the same product at the same dealer and pay different prices
- ryandrake 3y agoThis imaginary restaurant could just pay all these fees itself as a cost of doing business and transparently charge a slightly higher whole number to the average customer.
- tptacek 3y agoNo, it can't!
- ryandrake 3y agoWhy not? If my bill looks like this: $50 Steak Meal $10.54 Municipal We Hate You tax $5.87 Local ditch digging tax $2.15 State paperwork shredding tax $0.04 Federal fuck you tax Why can't instead the restaurant just write on the menu: $70 Steak ($50 + taxes and fees) ...and eat the costs itself? It's entirely within the businesses' power to do this. They choose not to.
- tptacek 3y agoSorry, I thought you were implying that ISPs could opt instead to pay some lump sum to the various governments charging these fees, and not break them out per customer. They can't do that. Nor can they charge "$70 steak ($50 + taxes and fees)" --- that's what they want to do. It's the FCC that's saying the bill has to look the way you're complaining about.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y agoPer the article, the FCC says ISPs are free to eat those costs behind the scenes and charge customers of the same plan the same flat rate (thus avoiding the need to itemize any taxes). The FCC is essentially creating an incentive structure that favors simplicity for consumers (possibly at the cost of making customers in low-tax areas pay a little more while those in high-tax areas pay a little less).
- tptacek 3y ago
- wildrhythms 3y ago>ISP fees are usage taxes applied per-customer Can you please explain what you meant by this?
- xp84 3y agoSure, but they are paying those fees in exchange for the incredibly valuable privilege of (usually) an exclusive monopoly on broadband in an entire city. This was the contract they accepted when they eagerly signed such a deal, because the last thing those companies want is to have a bunch of little fiber outfits going around wiring up all the richest and easiest-to-deploy neighborhoods with quality fiber internet service. Or -- g-d forbid -- municipalities cutting them out and laying fiber themselves. Their franchise fee protects them from either of those horrors. Pretending they're the victim for covering the costs they agreed to, and then acting like consumers are being unreasonable when we don't pay what was forced on us by our one choice of ISP is the boldest hypocrite move I've heard of yet from telcos.
- tptacek 3y agoFranchise agreements usually do not grant exclusivity to providers. And they're not the only fees we're talking about; counties, states, and the federal government apply pass-through taxes to ISP customers as well. Go look yours up. I just did, to make sure (I have opinions on this weird issue because I'm on my town's governing commission for this stuff --- go join yours too, I've gotten to do all sorts of cool stuff that I wouldn't have predicted from the nerdy charter of the commission --- and after 18 months of falling asleep every time the topic of the franchise agreement came up, I finally stayed awake and learned we were making a fairly huge amount of money by soaking residents for their ISP connections).