Texting is a part of our lives. It has become a very useful tool of communication because of its accessibility and comfort. For example, if you are in a meeting or in a place where you shouldn’t make any noise and you have to communicate with someone, then it becomes extremely useful. I have become so accustomed to text messaging that I don’t really like cellphone calls and I’m certain that there are many people like me in the world, who would rather text someone than calling them.
There is an article related to text messaging written byLucas Laursen for fortune.com. It is called “California Wants to Tax Your TextMessages. Here’s Why”, and as the name suggests, it talks about the California’sPublic Utilities Commission (PUC) wanting to tax text messages. This entity is in charge of telecommunications (telephone calls) in California. Their argument for wanting to tax text messaging is that it is a form of telecommunications. More specifically, they want to extend “an existing tax on calls to include text messages”.
The article gives a brief story about the landline era, when the U.S federal government established the “Public Purpose Programs”, which consisted on charging users of telephone services. Although, during the rise of the Internet, the telecoms industry “managed to get an exemption” for “information services” like web browsing and email. Since people are texting so much, the revenues have for PPP have dropped by “a third”. Since texting shares an infrastructure with voice calls they estimate that a tax “could raise 44.5million a year”. However, telecoms industry is fighting against this demand by saying that texting is an “email-like information service” which should be exempt from PPP.
I have never thought about the idea of texting being either telecommunications or an information service. Although after reading this article,I would argue that it is more of an information service than anything else. As I mentioned before, I don’t enjoy telephone calls, mostly because texting is so different. It shares practically no similarities with a call. The only thing that is the same is that they are both used to pass a message. However, emails, which are included as information services, can also serve to pass messages. I also don’t believe that each single text message should be taxed, just because of the amount of messages that a person can send on the daily. Apart from nobody liking to pay taxes, it would be a waste of money for a person. I understand the point of view from the PUC, however I don’t think taxing text messaging is the way to go. It would just cause more of an uproar.
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