A Dollar a Minute

Yesterday I wrote about making contingency plans for research projects in case the Trump administration’s attack on science reaches you. Today’s topic is an even scarier scenario: taxes on online services. As far as I can tell, there is no legal or technical obstacle to the American government mandating a dollar-a-minute tax on video conferencing for people outside the United States. The machinery needed to charge people is already in place—Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams all offer paid plans—and a quick check of IP addresses would correctly geolocate 99% of users. (Yes, you fool this using a VPN, but only a handful of individuals would, and companies aren’t going to flout the law that way.)

If you want to hit businesses and middle-class voters in Canada, the EU, and elsewhere, and raise a few billion dollars at the same time, why wouldn’t you do this? Why wouldn’t you tell Google that it has to start charging foreigners a penny for each email or ten cents a week for each kilobyte’s worth of docs? Because people would just migrate to other services? Please: most of those other services are also US-based, and if you’ve ever done a large service migration, you’ll realize how much pain the word “just” is painting over.

So here’s the scenario that actually keeps me up at night. It’s July 2025. The US economy is in a nosedive because of tariffs, so Trump needs money now. Musk feels exposed: the savings he promised DOGE would deliver haven’t materialized, so he needs something to fend off the MAGA sharks who now smell blood in the water. “Why should American companies be allowed to help foreigners compete with us for free?” he asks. Slack, GitHub, Airtable: everything business has gotten hooked on because it was free suddenly isn’t. Move your data to another provider? Sure, here are the federally-mandated rates for exporting your data in bulk. Go ahead, sit down for a moment if you need too…

The odds of this actually happening are low. The odds of someone breaking into my house are also low, but I still have insurance because that’s what sensible grownups do. We can all now see the river rising; it will be our own fault if we drown when the flood comes.