[abeld]

Two aspects one might consider when designing a tax is to make sure that it affects each person slightly, so that it won't be worth it for them to protest against it from a cost-benefit standpoint (which also means spreading the tax over as large a population as possible), and to ensure that it can be collected efficiently, that it is easy to enforce and hard to evade it.

Such an internet tax can be considered actually pretty good from these aspects: assuming it is capped (as was announced after the initial uproar) its fairly small compared to the cost of the subscription, and it is essentially collected by the ISPs, who already have the billing mechanism set up and need either licences for the frequencies they use for mobile internet, or right-of-way for the cables they use for the wired internet service and thus can easily be coerced by the government to collect this tax. (for example, income tax will be collected much less efficiently, due to tax evasion, etc.)

Of course, another aspect is what behaviour the given tax will reward / punish, and from this viewpoint such a tax (in any form) is catastrophic, but these two aspects can a lot of the "artificiality" of certain taxes.