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   Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange)'s status on Friday, 17-Apr-2026 04:25:44 JST Andrew Zonenberg

   • Rich Felker

   @dalias given the prevalence of cloud/outsourced compute, how would you implement this? Would AWS have to collect signed certifications from every customer as to whether any given instance was an exempted purpose or not? Or tax them at the full rate regardless, making the entire cloud business model non viable and forcing a transition back to on premises hosting (which I'd prefer but it's a somewhat orthogonal issue)

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 17-Apr-2026 04:25:42 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @azonenberg Thanks for asking! This was part of my thread on the concept last time (I think it was back on :birdsite:) and it's important. For oursourced compute, you'd have it charged against your personal tax-exempt allowance in order not to pay a huge premium on it.

     This would also get rid of dirt cheap anonymous outsourced compute, which is probably a mix of good and bad. But even with the tax (on energy part of hosting only), VPS for small websites etc would still be cheap. Just massive compute wouldn't.

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 17-Apr-2026 05:12:28 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @azonenberg Formally AWS would be paying the tax on their usage, but would be able to reduce it by documenting that it was outsourced compute for their customers.

     So they'd either need to raise prices massively for everyone and run themselves out of business, or integrate with a system for charging the energy usage against customers' allowances.

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     Andrew Zonenberg (azonenberg@ioc.exchange)'s status on Friday, 17-Apr-2026 05:12:29 JST Andrew Zonenberg

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias i guess more generally would the tax be on AWS or the customer?

     Like if your tax rate depends on usage and you have 100 customers pulling 10 kW each to make the numbers round, do you tax at the 10 kW or 1 MW rate if they're independent users under one roof?

     Does it change if the customers own the hardware and are just paying for rack space in a colo, or if they're renting a third party server?