No to Text Tax!

(The article below appeared in today’s Panorama Magazine and Tempo. For those who share my sentiments and have a Facebook account, please sign up and support our cause via the No to Text Tax! page. Thanks!) The House committee on ways and means recently approved a measure imposing a five-centavo tax on every text message. The authors of this bill estimate that around P36 billion in new revenues will be raised with this single tax proposal. Telecommunications companies notably, SMART and Globe, are vigorously protesting this text tax which Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile said the Senate would block. I certainly hope so! Consider this: three thousand Filipinos leave the country daily to work or travel abroad, and nearly all of them have mobile...