Uganda enacts unenforceable, ridiculous anti-"gossip" internet tax

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/31/200-shillings-a-day.html

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…but it’s unclear how it will be enforced.

First of all, how will it be collected? Annually? Microtransactions? Nigerian princes?

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Mostly via mobile phones, which are heavily monitored and which support micro-transactions already. The majority of this is easily automated by comparing sites people visit against a short list of the top social media sites and adding the tax to their phone bill automatically. (Yes, I am aware of the bazillion ways this could be circumvented and the possible false positives, but I doubt any of that prevents Museveni from sleeping well at night.)

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Uganda’s Bureau of Statistics has numbers that are a trifle behind the times; but in 2015 they reported just over 130,000 wireline internet subscribers and just under 7.35 million mobile users; with annual growth twice as high in the latter category.

Even if mobile devices weren’t typically harder to control and more treasonous than real computers(it sure will be a challenge for a carrier to know if you are using the social media app they baked into your firmware…); tagging and categorization of the traffic at the ISP level, for any ‘social media’ with network effects large enough to matter, just isn’t a terribly hard problem except against people who are spending rather more than 5 cents a day on VPNs and onion routing and stuff.

(edit: aside from the fact that mobile users are even softer targets; carrier billing is already set up for dealing with(usually piling on) very small charges; either by taking bites out of your airtime card if it’s a prepaid setup or just by padding your bill if it’s a subscription.Carriers might do some posturing about how ‘burdensome’ the collection process would be; but architecturally it would be no more difficult that nailing people for premium-rate SMS scams or company-store ringtones; an exercise that, mysteriously, is deeply non-burdensome to telcos.)

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Imagine if governments around the world would tax you 5 cents every day you are using social media…
Huh.

(Obviously I would be laughing to myself in my cave in the woods thinking about all the money I’m saving)

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