Talk:Internet tax

UN facts

"The United Nations has in the past considered proposing an e-mail tax, in an effort to raise funds to boost Internet technology access to poor countries.[3] Citing a "knowledge gap" between the United States and underdeveloped countries, proponents of e-mail taxes believe that its potential redistributive effects make it an ideal tax for implementation on a global scale. According to a report by the United Nations Development Program entitled "Globalization With a Human Face", Internet users are mostly males located in the United States, a situation UN researchers suggest puts the world's undeveloped countries at risk of being left behind in a race for knowledge.[4] "The literally well connected have an overpowering advantage over the unconnected poor, whose voices and concerns are being left out of the global conversation," the UNDP said in a 1999 press release. To "rectify the imbalance" between Internet users and non-users, the report's authors proposed a "tax of one US cent on every 100 lengthy e-mails" which they believed would generate $70 billion a year. Imposition of e-mail taxes by the U.S. government or any of its political subdivisions is banned by the Internet Tax Freedom Act."

The only reference given in this section is to this report. I've gone over the report a few times, and have found nothing about 1. internet taxes, 2. redistribution of wealth, or 3. Internet demographics, with the exception of one mentioning of how many people use the Internet in Luxembourg and one mentioning of the existence of a digital divide. Am I missing something, or is this paragraph in reality totally unsourced? This is, I should say, my biggest pet peeve with Wikipedia at the moment — things that look sourced but are really not sourced at all. Someone plops a reference in and nobody bothers to check on it. --Mr.98 (talk) 22:53, 4 August 2010 (UTC)