But information isn't a taxable item, since it's not a monetary amount. It would be like taxing electricity. You can tax the money you pay for it, but not the

But information isn't a taxable item, since it's not a monetary amount. It would be like taxing electricity. You can tax the money you pay for it, but not the information itself. You're not using your education to generate data. Most of the data is made by other people's education and then multiplied many times. Even for cases where you do create information, like in your comment, many magnitudes more data was sent over your line to get it before my eyes. If they wanted to tax new information, they wouldn't do it through a flat fee per GB. Sales tax is a tax on a monetary exchange. You tax the price you pay for your shoes, you don't tax "$3 per shoe". The point of that is taxing value rather than quantity. How you use the tax money it is irrelevant to how you acquire it. And last but not least: we're already drowning in 'pointless data'. A lot of the internet's capacity is used to transfer scripts and styles rather than real information. Whether you consider that pointless is a different matter, but it's not up to the government to say what you should consider pointless data and what you shouldn't.