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We should tax data. Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. Th

by beloch 13d ago

We should tax data. Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realistically enforce privacy standards? If we tax data, then we'll have an incentive to track how data is being used and corporations will suddenly have a direct financial interest in not just casually collecting data if they don't need to. Such taxes should be gauged to be tolerable for Google and Meta, but high enough to make companies who make their money via other avenues (e.g. Smart TV sellers) to take a pass on data collection.

drdaeman 13d ago
I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?
- matheusmoreira 13d ago
  > how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists If you're a corporation, you're taxed. If you're a human, you're not.
  - rileymat2 13d ago
    Perhaps you are human that wants to isolate the expenses, activity and liability into a corporate organization, like Wikimedia?
  - mitxela 13d ago
    Oh cool so Google just has to become a sole trader
MrDrMcCoy 13d ago
I can imagine this having negative consequences for open platforms, such as Wikipedia, Bluesky, Mastodon, Common Crawl, etc. It could have implications for Stack Exchange keeping their datasets downloadable, and general API availability of most platforms. How would this make provisions for keeping the things that are currently free to access still free? People are already buckling under the weight of subscription fatigue, and I can only see this making that worse. I'm willing to give up a lot for the sake of privacy, but the people who would be most affected by such a change could stand to lose a lot more.
rileymat2 13d ago
I am not sure what the point of this is. If they are exporting data for sale, we can tax the value they are selling it at. If they are using data to generate ad revenue, we can tax that. If we want to enforce privacy standards, we can make liability laws around sharing that data with third parties; we can make it harder for users to consent to the sharing of data by making users decide and approve on a case by case basis. There is so much to do before exotic schemes, for instance way less intrusive things like making it so privacy policies legally survive bankruptcy.
- dbdr 13d ago
  There's at least one possible point, which is where the income is taxed. If data is not considered valuable, the German branch of company X can send data to its Irish branch, and the profit realized in Ireland (with very low tax rate), while this value was generated in Germany but the German state gets no income. And if Ireland raises its tax rate, send it to another fiscal paradise. Potentially, if data was accounted as valuable, the income would be accounted for where it is generated, each country gets its fair share, and tax avoidance gets harder.
- like_any_other 13d ago
  > making it so privacy policies legally survive bankruptcy They currently don't? Why? Isn't that completely insane? How is that different from buying a music CD with the restriction that it may not be used commercially, declaring bankruptcy, and selling it without that restriction, so the buyer can make and sell copies of it? I.e. it's using bankruptcy to create from thin air and sell permissions that one was never given. Can I, in the process of personal bankruptcy, sell information I've signed an NDA on? Can I sell genetically modified seeds that I signed a contract forbidding me from re-planting them, now without the re-planting restriction?
  - rileymat2 13d ago
    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12810892/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12810892/ Look at the 23andMe case, which ended sort of ok. Previously, a company called Toysmart caused some legislation to pass some specific rules around it, but it did not go far enough. > Can I sell genetically modified seeds that I signed a contract forbidding me from. You can't but the court can adjust terms.
ccgreg 13d ago
How does that work for non-profit web crawls like the Common Crawl Foundation?
SV_BubbleTime 13d ago
Right, because if you want a solid solution to a problem, you ask governments to tax it! Always works.
baxtr 13d ago
Why not just tax the profits of the data companies? If we start taxing data, why not tax any other underlying asset a company makes profits from?
- psd1 13d ago
  Data is an unpriced natural resource. Your pabulum is already priced. We should, generally, tax extraction, because otherwise the externalities are imposed on the public for free. In the case of mining, that's e.g. resources taken from the future; in the case of data, that's privacy taken from the public.
  - hinkley 11d ago
    Data's probably more like air. We are still trying to figure out how to hold people accountable for how they misuse air for manufacturing and power production. Water and soil were easier to work out, but we still flounder a bit. We've been slowly piecing air consumption together but Kyoto failed to deliver a holistic system that people would accept, so here we are experiencing record heat waves and droughts, which broke records that have already been broken twice in the last few decades.
autoexec 12d ago
Nah, let's just make surveillance capitalism illegal instead. That way, rich companies who can afford any tax you put on them and can bribe governments for loopholes to make sure they never pay what they owe still can't spy on you and use that data to make money. Let's outlaw the problem and not just find a way to make money change hands every time the abuses happen.

by beloch 13d ago

drdaeman 13d ago

I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?

matheusmoreira 13d ago
> how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists If you're a corporation, you're taxed. If you're a human, you're not.
- rileymat2 13d ago
  Perhaps you are human that wants to isolate the expenses, activity and liability into a corporate organization, like Wikimedia?
- mitxela 13d ago
  Oh cool so Google just has to become a sole trader

MrDrMcCoy 13d ago

I can imagine this having negative consequences for open platforms, such as Wikipedia, Bluesky, Mastodon, Common Crawl, etc. It could have implications for Stack Exchange keeping their datasets downloadable, and general API availability of most platforms. How would this make provisions for keeping the things that are currently free to access still free? People are already buckling under the weight of subscription fatigue, and I can only see this making that worse. I'm willing to give up a lot for the sake of privacy, but the people who would be most affected by such a change could stand to lose a lot more.

rileymat2 13d ago

I am not sure what the point of this is. If they are exporting data for sale, we can tax the value they are selling it at. If they are using data to generate ad revenue, we can tax that. If we want to enforce privacy standards, we can make liability laws around sharing that data with third parties; we can make it harder for users to consent to the sharing of data by making users decide and approve on a case by case basis. There is so much to do before exotic schemes, for instance way less intrusive things like making it so privacy policies legally survive bankruptcy.

dbdr 13d ago
There's at least one possible point, which is where the income is taxed. If data is not considered valuable, the German branch of company X can send data to its Irish branch, and the profit realized in Ireland (with very low tax rate), while this value was generated in Germany but the German state gets no income. And if Ireland raises its tax rate, send it to another fiscal paradise. Potentially, if data was accounted as valuable, the income would be accounted for where it is generated, each country gets its fair share, and tax avoidance gets harder.
like_any_other 13d ago
> making it so privacy policies legally survive bankruptcy They currently don't? Why? Isn't that completely insane? How is that different from buying a music CD with the restriction that it may not be used commercially, declaring bankruptcy, and selling it without that restriction, so the buyer can make and sell copies of it? I.e. it's using bankruptcy to create from thin air and sell permissions that one was never given. Can I, in the process of personal bankruptcy, sell information I've signed an NDA on? Can I sell genetically modified seeds that I signed a contract forbidding me from re-planting them, now without the re-planting restriction?
- rileymat2 13d ago
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12810892/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12810892/ Look at the 23andMe case, which ended sort of ok. Previously, a company called Toysmart caused some legislation to pass some specific rules around it, but it did not go far enough. > Can I sell genetically modified seeds that I signed a contract forbidding me from. You can't but the court can adjust terms.

ccgreg 13d ago

How does that work for non-profit web crawls like the Common Crawl Foundation?

SV_BubbleTime 13d ago

Right, because if you want a solid solution to a problem, you ask governments to tax it! Always works.

baxtr 13d ago

Why not just tax the profits of the data companies? If we start taxing data, why not tax any other underlying asset a company makes profits from?

psd1 13d ago
Data is an unpriced natural resource. Your pabulum is already priced. We should, generally, tax extraction, because otherwise the externalities are imposed on the public for free. In the case of mining, that's e.g. resources taken from the future; in the case of data, that's privacy taken from the public.
- hinkley 11d ago
  Data's probably more like air. We are still trying to figure out how to hold people accountable for how they misuse air for manufacturing and power production. Water and soil were easier to work out, but we still flounder a bit. We've been slowly piecing air consumption together but Kyoto failed to deliver a holistic system that people would accept, so here we are experiencing record heat waves and droughts, which broke records that have already been broken twice in the last few decades.

autoexec 12d ago

Nah, let's just make surveillance capitalism illegal instead. That way, rich companies who can afford any tax you put on them and can bribe governments for loopholes to make sure they never pay what they owe still can't spy on you and use that data to make money. Let's outlaw the problem and not just find a way to make money change hands every time the abuses happen.