Voice Chat may get taxed in India
As per a story in the Hindustan Times, voice features offered by some of the popular Internet messengers (Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, Skype) may soon be taxed. While reviewing the licence norms for Internet service providers (ISPs), the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had recommended to the Department of Telecommunications in May this year that multinational service providers that provide telephony in India through their messenger services should be registered in India and their services be taxed.
The country’s ISPs currently pay 12.36 per cent of their revenues as service tax.
Yahoo and Skype argue that their services were not registered in India and so the service tax is not applicable to their services.
via HT
August 22nd, 2007 at 6:32 am
This is terrible news.
What will they tax next?
Emails?
I hope they don’t tax blog comments.
The country would be rich if they had a rupee for every word of every blog comment I have made so far.
Regards
G Vishwanath
JP Nagar, Bengaluru
August 26th, 2007 at 7:01 am
What a pipedream. Stunningly stupid. Wonder how they plan to enforce it. Monitor traffic is it? Or try to block ports?
Instead of toeing the Telco’s line, TRAI should just follow other regulatory bodies and leagalise VoIP.