Comment by jjmarr
6 months ago
Not necessary, Uganda has been levying social media taxes on end-users since 2018 by automatically adding it to your cell phone bill if you access a social media website. About 2.7¢ per day of usage.[1]
Virtually everyone gets their internet from an ISP that is regulated in the country that the user lives in. There are no technical barriers to implementing a permitting system in the United States.
Linking connections to real people is self-enforcing when there is a usage-based tax.
[1] https://www.africanews.com/2018/04/13/uganda-s-social-media-...
Do you happen to know what the answer of this scheme to "I have a wireguard connection to another country, you can't see my traffic" is? I know that enough of the population would never bother so it wouldn't significantly harm it as a revenue scheme, but if your goal is avoiding identification rather than taxation then the stakes could be high enough to make the effort worthwhile.
The political answer to circumventing laws is usually some form of punishment. This is often much easier than weird technical solutions.
Indeed. Governments have to worry about 99.9% of cases covered with a law or regulation have punishment in term of fine or imprisonment.
Those remaining very likely have multiple advantages like advance technical knowledge, connection to powerful people in business / governments, money and legal support in case they end up on wrong side of law. There is very little benefit and lot of effort to catch these unless they are running some kind of criminal organization which adversely affects their government/regime.
Is that what happens in this specific case?
> enough of the population would never bother
People have bothered with downloading low-quality Mp3s from Napster, figuring out video codex and modding game consoles to get free video games. If the need is dire enough, the users will figure it out, no matter how high the friction is.
Those with enough technical chops will figure out how to do it by themselves, those with enough intelligence will find resources on the internet, the rest will ask a friend or pay a local IT person to get it set up for them.
> People have bothered with downloading low-quality Mp3s from Napster, figuring out video codex and modding game consoles to get free video games
That's not "enough", it was extremely nice and probably less than 1% of population
> Do you happen to know what the answer of this scheme to "I have a wireguard connection to another country, you can't see my traffic" is?
WG traffic is easily identifiable and able to be blocked, it's what happens in countries that ban VPNs.
At that point something along the likes of shadowsocks would be more effective, and the question still remains.
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Yes, but is that what happens in this specific case? There are enough legitimate uses of VPNs that blocking them solely in case people wriggle out of social media taxes would be extremely heavy-handed.
Tying usage to connection seems feasible, but age verification (and the hypothetical usage permit) is trying to tie usage to a specific person. You could probably pretend they correspond 1:1 for cellular, but what about wired connections to households with more than one person living in them?
VPN or TOR?