Indian Tax administrators have thrown up a challenge to the International Community to redefine the legal status of "Cyber Speech". The affront has come in a rather innocuous looking provision under "Expansion of Coverage of Service Tax". In an administrative notification, the Ministry of Finance has announced that from July 16th of this year, any web site which is collecting a fee for making its content available to the Netizens has to pay a service tax calculated at 5% of the amount so collected.
As a result of this provision, sites such as Crisil.com, Icra.com, Capitalmarket .com, Cmie.com , lexsite.com, matrix.co.in, numtv.com, e-gurucool.com and many other sites which have built in a revenue model for passing on value added content on a fee will now have to pay a service tax.
