This has come up a many times in the last week, so I thought it was worth putting this somewhere I can point to.
With respect to "free" Internet services, it isn't really that we are doing micro work for free. The problem is that we are bartering information with companies, not that we're weak exploited morons. The tech companies trade us entertainment and knowledge for our information. The result is that both we and the tech companies evade taxation & revenue, and that the tech companies can work for years to aggregate and increase the value of that information. I think it's essential for global stability that we shift to a tax policy against the increase in market valuation of transnational corporations, not of their annual income, because no one even knows what the value is of the information we give up at the time of the transaction, so an income tax is just useless.
With respect to "free" Internet services, it isn't really that we are doing micro work for free. The problem is that we are bartering information with companies, not that we're weak exploited morons. The tech companies trade us entertainment and knowledge for our information. The result is that both we and the tech companies evade taxation & revenue, and that the tech companies can work for years to aggregate and increase the value of that information. I think it's essential for global stability that we shift to a tax policy against the increase in market valuation of transnational corporations, not of their annual income, because no one even knows what the value is of the information we give up at the time of the transaction, so an income tax is just useless.
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