By Archie Orillosa, Special to The Manila Times

In 2008, a proposal for a 20-centavo tax on every SMS sent was pushed by Sen. Richard Gordon and Speaker Prospero Nograles. It was supported by Malacañang. The consumer group TXTPower quickly pointed out this step as a “slap in the face of people in the midst of crisis.”

Nearly 1.7 to 1.9-billion text messages are sent in the country per day. The government expects to collect P340 to 380 million daily by imposing a tax of 20 centavos per text. The proponents said the new government income will be “spent only for health and education especially in the countryside.”

Plans to impose taxes on SMS messages are not new. They were among the main reasons why TXTPower was formed in 2001. That year, due to the government’s ballooning deficit, the International Monetary Fund proposed new taxes on SMS. As the world’s texting capital and SMS being one of the most popular and accessible means of communications, the texting public was one of the targets of the government, which hopes to cash in on the texting craze. Each time, the public resisted the imposition of the tax.

In 2004, the anti-text tax campaign pitted mobile users against the then Speaker of the House, Jose de Venecia. With his mobile number passed around, a text message was sent by irate texters with a clear message against the text tax. The next day, a major daily put de Venecia’s response to the consumer action: No more text tax.

In January 2008, TXTPower fought for the scrapping of a proposed text tax with a “texters revolt” directed at the President’s trade secretary who floated the proposal and denigrated the texting public by trying to tag texting as a “sin,” comparing it with alcohol and tobacco. The day after, Press Secretary
Ignacio Bunye announced that Malacañang would not pursue the new text taxes. Had it pushed through, text messages would have cost P1.50, with P0.50 going to the government.

Texting and calls are already being charged the 12-percent value-added tax. Overseas calls are also slapped with an overseas communications tax. There are other ways to raise funds for education and health like reducing payments to fraudulent foreign debt, lessening unproductive expenditures and removing corruption in government.

Texting is the de facto messaging standard today, because it is cheap and affordable. It is important to the public. It is used principally for personal and official reasons. Overseas Filipino migrant workers (who already number around ten million) use this tool to communicate with their families left at home. We also transact business using texting and send messages to lighten up moments especially in hard times like the economic crisis we are all in.

With such vital function in society, texting and mobile phones should thus be considered a public utility. Public utilities are services that are used by the people in their daily activities and economic production.
These include power, water, fuel, transportation and telecommunications services. Limiting access to these services by increasing their costs through taxes would introduce additional difficulties to the people whose sufferings are eased a little when they use the public utilities’ services.

For transportation and telecommunications services, the public utility provides the infrastructure and means that enable people to take advantage of the goods and services inherent to the utility. For example, a mass transportation system provides point-to-point mobility for people in an affordable and timely manner. Telecommunications services should likewise provide the means of communications between two or more people. It involves mobile phones, the cell towers, telephone lines, remote stations and even switching terminals. If these utilities are taxed, or made unaffordable by raising their prices, the daily lives of the people using would become harder.

We as consumers want cheap, affordable, and accessible communication services. We believe that it
should be treated as a public utility and must be available to everyone, and we think that is possible given with the judicious use of the rich natural and human resources of our country. Adding resources to the budget of health and education should be done by taking away unnecessary expenditure on junkets, debt service, improving tax collection and putting a control on the massive corruption in government.

Imposing a tax—even only five centavos—on text messages and calls only passes the burden to the consumers who are using the cheapest form of communication available to them.

Archie Orillosa is a member of AGHAM. He graduated from Adamson University in 2006 with a degree in electrical engineering. He is part of TXTPower (txtpower.org) from whose statements he based this write-up.