Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by alkonaut 3206 days ago
Not sure I understand the question. Isn't that "most of it"?

I use a road to get to work. My work pay my salary. My salary pays amazon for crap delivered to my house. The package comes delivered on the same road. The internet connection I used to visit amazons page is delivered via fiber to my house, funded just like other infrastructure. So the road and fiber was very important for my society being a developed high-income one, which is why I'm buying crap from the internet in the first place.

1 comments

All of those things you mentioned are already paid by somebody: the customer pays for your broadband and couriers pay for roads thorough their revenue taxes and tolls.

However, the topic here is the indirect benefit of being a wealthy nation where you can have customers wealthy enough to care about your products in the first place. The argument is that this is the result of something the society or the government did and it whoever benefits from that must pay their share for the access to that benefit, possibly to keep or improve the conditions that lead that wealth in the first place.

If I'm not mistaken, a lot of the fiber rollout in France at least was heavily subsidized by the government, and hence, taxes.
Sure, but by this reasoning every website on the internet should be recieving a bill from the French government.

And Netflix should be getting a bill from Verizon when their traffic goes though their network.

All those thing are indeed being paid ... through taxes, thus the whole point of collecting them.