On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 02:42:19PM +1200, Steve Phillips wrote: After bailing our Telecom account manager up about the latest excuse as to why Telecom are not willing to peer, it came back that the Tax Dept are claiming that the people peering at APE are committing tax fraud due to the traffic traveling across the APE link having a real dollar value associated with it. SPEAKING FOR MYSELF AND NOBODY ELSE!!! THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE AND MAY CONTAIN NO FACTS WHATSOEVER. IN FACT CONSIDER THIS PURE FANTASY FOR A RAVING LUNATIC. I heard this... and was very surprised when I heard it. I made enquiries with lawyers and accountants and the advice I was given (verbally, nothing in writing) was indeed that it was not something they had ever heard of... and neither had various people at the IRD it seems when I called, and when I explained it to them they didn't seem to think it would apply or even be worth their effort getting involved with. Not only this, the IRS in the US and similar organizations elsewhere in the world don't seem to want to be involved either... the only place that does seem to care is Australia from (I believe) a precedent set by Telstra Australia many years ago it seems, so no big surprises there, and the only reason they care there is because peering costs money, something that makes sense if you are then incumbent and largest carrier in one of the few countries that has more expensive and more poorly run networks than NZ. Telecom claim that the Tax Dept have contacted everyone about this issue and that we should all be paying each other for the privilege of peering in order to recover the costs associated with traffic across APE. Then each of us should be paying GST on the traffic to/from each of our peers. Who from the tax department contacted who? Someone at TCNZ needs to supply names please? And then the person(s) from IRD should explain why nobody from IRD and no tax consultants have ever heard about this. Not only this, the whole concept of place monetary value here is completely stupid... who pays who? If you are an ISP you will have a different idea than if you are a hosting company.... what's more, how do you decide on a value on the data here? How to you measure it? Do packet headers count? What about DoS attacks? What about varying rates for different traffic types? What about different times of the day? How about charging more for packets that had to traverse further through your network? How about charging less for those packets which took longer to arrive because of queuing? Maybe NNTP traffic is over lower value because most gets thrown away? Maybe HTML pages are of higher value than images? Maybe images with flesh tones should have a higher value than those without? If you accept peering is a best effort zero-settlement bilateral agreement for the interests of customers of both networks then the above issues go away. Neither party gains a significant competitive advantage over the other, they both 'win'. Most importantly, the CONSUMER and PUBLIC AS A WHOLE wins. We are apparently going to get an answer to this latest problem within the next 90 min's, I wonder what the next excuse will be.. And they said what? * There are legal issues And they are? Who from the crown or state can stipulate these? * There is a contract you need to sign which we cant show you as Telstra and Clear said it was rubbish If this was indeed the case (remember, I am speaking for myself here), then presumably there were reasons as to why representatives from these companies said this? Is there not a more recent document that takes into account the issues raised? * We have the connectivity up there but are not allowed to use it yet (ironically this was a few hours after the post showing the interface traffic stats) <mumble> traceroute <mumble> <mumble> anyone on this list got a TCNZ connection of some kind? <mumble> DSL would do <mumble> * We are considering dropping the domestic service offering as it's not viable Sure, customers only want to see US sites, they never want domestic traffic. Email with attachments should take hours to arrive. Especially that to and from government departments. The most cost effective way to send data between large NZ carriers is via the US. * The tax dept wont allow us (or anyone else) to peer as they require us to pay GST on the traffic On traffic sent or received? How much? Presumably we can claim against this the cost of metering it? This will almost certainly exceed any tax on perceived value. I would argue if the IRD ever does state charging is a good idea, then people should filter out the network 203.97.170.0/23 and any subnets thereof :) --cw --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog