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El Reg reports
The US state of Oregon says it will charge Comcast tens of millions of dollars in taxes after revoking a tax break the cable giant had claimed on its broadband service.
The state's Department of Revenue (DOR) has denied a request by Comcast that it be granted an exemption reserved for companies that offer gigabit internet service in the state.
Written to lure Google's Fiber service to Portland after years of courtship, the tax break would give exemptions to reward the installation of high-speed fiber broadband.
Comcast [claimed] its "Gigabit Pro" service tops out at 2Gbit/s and thus made the cable giant eligible to claim the same breaks as Google.
The DOR, however, did not agree, and it ruled earlier this week that Comcast will have to pay the taxes.
[...] Critics of Comcast have previously argued that the Gigabit Pro service is prohibitively expensive (up to $4,600 a year) and only reaches a small number of Oregon residents.
[...] Both Google and Frontier also had their applications denied because neither has an active gigabit service in the state.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2016, @05:48PM
I live in a rural area.
There is, nominally, DSL. I had it for a while. It steadily got worse and worse until it would, without prior announcement, simply be offline for days at a time. Initially, when they installed the line, it was great, but they never maintained it.
I'm sure they got their tax breaks and incentives for providing a service, but I ended up going satellite because it doesn't depend on a landline being maintained.
I am thoroughly opposed to any subsidies that do not also stipulate a percentage of market penetration coupled with an SLA, independently audited, over a given timeframe. All figures to be publically available.