Virtual taxation?

As more and more people around the globe get into online environments; whether it’s simply something like myspace or facebook, engaging an online community (eg kotaku) or playing online games; governments see the pie getting bigger, and consequently, want more fingers in larger pieces.

Congress (that’s in America folks) will be issuing its report on the potential taxation of virtual goods in August sometime. And I belive that South Korea has just passed some simliar law.

It’ll be interesting to see how much affect this has upon in-game economies, which are mostly player driven. I don’t think that it’ll affect the legitimate player run economies, (think EVE Online, or WoW) so much as it will affect the people who buy gold from the gold farmers.
I guess it depends what form these taxes take, whether it is simply a tax on each transaction (virtual)? Or it it’s a tax on real-world transactions for virtual items / rewards.

Everquest 2, run by SOE (Sony Online Entertainment), in an effort to combat gold farming, run their own store, station Exchange where people can buy ingame items. This is vastly preferable to gold farmers and the inevitable bots that they bring. But I imagine something like this will decline in popularity and use if people find that government is taking a cut (driving prices up?).