If U.S. Rep. Christopher Cox (R-California) has his way, the current federal moratorium on Internet taxes would become permanent, saying he would "personally…push" to pass his bill to make it so.
Cox's targets with the bill include the ancient telephone tax—never repealed, levied originally to finance the Spanish-American War—to the Internet.
"There isn't a good reason for it," said Cox in a published interview March 14. "On the (House) Energy and Commerce Committee, which I just left after 10 years, the issue has been studied exhaustively. The Spanish-American War tax, as we know from exhaustive research, ought to have been repealed over half a century ago. The Congress promised when it was enacted that immediately upon the conclusion of the Spanish-American War and the need to finance it, this so-called 'luxury tax' on the super-rich would be repealed."
Cox also said Voice-over Internet Protocol needs to be addressed by Congress in terms of whether it would be the telecommunications model of the future, or whether Depression-era regulation would become the Internet's model of the future, an idea that troubled him. "I hope the Internet is not going to be dragged into the 1930s," he said.
He also said the government should help subsidize the underprivileged regarding VoIP and similar "universal services," but that it should be done from general tax revenues. "There's no reason to pick on technology," he said, "which is responsible for 100 percent of the productivity gains in our economy."
