You had me until you went for the car in SF.  ;-)

That's about negative externalities, which are not sins but impose costs
on other people -- you're just paying for the costs you impose on others.

I work in SF but live outside -- I rarely drive in, usually drive to BART
and ride in.  There's just no room for all those cars.  Congestion has a
price, and congestion is the price of population density (which has
networking benefits).  It's all trade-offs.

Not *everything* is about religion...  ;-)

Dan

PS:  As a non-smoker, I can't really deal with other people's second-hand
smoke, makes me choke -- it imposes a cost on me when I'm forced to
breathe it (or try to hold my breath until I can walk away).  So part of
this is about who gets to impose what costs on others, and gets to prevent
costs being imposed on themselves.

So ultimately it's about power, not morality, though morality is often
offered up as an excuse for power-driven policies...


-- 
Any opinions expressed in this message are those of the author alone and
do not necessarily reflect any position of the author's employer.



On Tue, March 22, 2011 4:59 pm, Marc Perkel wrote:
> So it's really a sin tax.
>
> We could tax .gambling to fun probability mathematics education in high
> school.
> We could tax .prostitution to fund abstinence education.
> Would we tax .atheist to fund religious education or tax .god to fund
> science education?
>
> I'm just raising the question if the purpose of ICANN is to be in the
> morality tax business.
>
> I personally don't like morality taxes. I used to live in San Francisco
> where I committed the immoral act of owning a car. San Francisco looks
> down on car owners as sinners the way non-smokers look at smokers.
> That's just kind of something I find annoying, unless of course I'm the
> one who gets to decide who has to pay the sin taxes. (not me!)
>
> Getting back on track. If ICANN gets into the sin tax business then
> that's mission creep. It leads to creeping into law enforcement, moral
> police, things that ICANN should not be doing.
>
> Granted someone needs to protect children from predators but .xxx has
> nothing to do with it. And it's logically inconsistent.
>
> porn.xxx - tax
> porn.com - no tax
>
> Now - if there were a TLD where to join the TLD requires special
> processing - like .lawyer might require validating that you are a member
> of the bar - then the cost of doing that should be included in the
> domain. But in my mind he cost has to be directly connected to the TLD.
>
> And - that is the point I'm trying to make.
>
> On 3/22/2011 4:32 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
>> It's supposed to donate to general foundations/organizations working on
>> child abuse. But really that's mostly posturing of course; governments
>> have seized on regulating the .xxx domain as if putting requirements on
>> it really combats the more serious problems. As Perkel pointed out, the
>> logic behind that often doesn't hold up.
>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Professor Andrew A Adams                      [log in to unmask]
>>> Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and Deputy
>>> Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
>>> Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/
>