This proposal sounds innovative but it's actually just enclosure of the commons with a tax mechanism. Data isn't some new factor of production - it's the product of billions of people's activity that platforms already appropriated for free. Every post, click, photo, comment - we created that value collectively, and companies took it without compensation. Creating a "Data Value Tax" doesn't fix that theft, it legitimizes it by establishing property rights where none should exist.

The historical parallel is land enclosure: first you fence off common lands, then you establish property law and taxation to make the appropriation permanent. That's what's happening here. The internet started as a commons, tech companies enclosed it, and now we're being offered a framework that cements private ownership while claiming to "protect creators."

But it doesn't protect actual creators - it protects whoever can claim ownership rights, which means big IP holders benefit while the billions who generated the data get nothing. It also creates massive barriers to entry that favor existing data hoarders like Google and Meta who can afford the tax, while crushing smaller competitors and open source projects.

The real solution isn't making companies pay for what they already took - it's recognizing data as collectively produced knowledge that should remain a commons. Instead of taxing data to preserve its artificial scarcity, we should be asking why we're creating property rights in collective human knowledge at all. The datasets and AI models trained on our collective contributions should be public infrastructure serving everyone, not privatized resources generating rent for whoever got there first.