I was chatting with my coworker and he wondered what I though about a proposal to implement a plan that would place a charge of one cent per email sent that would be added to the users isp bill. There would also be a lower limit to what can be charged, like say if you rack up less than $100 per year then your tax is waived. The idea of the tax is to discourage mass email spammers. Altough I was initially pretty violently opposed to such a idea I can not think of a compelling argument against it. What do ya’ll think of such a plan?
A question… why do we need a $0.01 tax on email in the first place?
What about university email? My profs have to send things out to hundreds of people each day; would there be a *.edu exemption? I like Microsoft’s idea of having a small puzzle to complete before an email is sent, and I think that may deter quite a few spammers without charging the rest of us to use the services we’re used to getting for free.
It would seriously effect mail lists, some of which are for very good causes, others (like Craiglist that I use) offer good local information to people who have actively requested that information.
I would prefer a $0.01 charge per email but subject to the recipient requesting that the sender is charged. So instead of deleting your spam emails, you mark them as unwanted please charge, and only in those cases should the sender be billed. This would form a strong insentive against sending out unwanted emails without harming legitimate emailers.
When you buy a stamp for a letter, you are paying to have it delivered. I already pay my ISP for delivery of the files I send (be they emails, files, text messages, whatever). And that is taxed as well.
While I can think of reasons to do this, they would up the costs of doing business. And probably just lead to greater useage of IM. There are other, fairer ways to control email/spam.
Well, a hundred emails a day is only a dollar. The “floor” that I discussed could easily be adjusted to fit a reasonable value. If the email never leaves the universities intranet then it would not be logged and taxed. The taxes could be only be applied cross domains. For example somthing sent by university.edu directly to university.edu would never enter the global internet.
Fairness wise, you are already paying for spammers using a disproportiante amout of bandwidth now. I imagine that this tax could lead to lower isp costs. Remeber, if you use less than hundreds of emails a day you won’t have the taxes applied to you.
I can think of some very compelling reasons. I don’t want to pay a penny per email. Do you? What would prevent me from setting up my own email server for sending email and not taxing myself?* Using an over seas email provider? Playing semantics and implimenting the (Taxless Communications Medium) TCM protocal? People are cheap they’ll move over to TCM just to save a few pennies. TCM could use the puzzle thing to prevent spam.
I’m writing my congress people just to make sure they know I don’t want email taxed. I recomend others do the same.
*anyone with a computer and the internet could do this one. Since I could use my ISP email address as the return address I would only need to run the server when sending email.
I’d be willing to bet spam is minor blip in the eye of stuff like online gaming and p2p.
When did you say that? Well if there was some factor that prevented it from affecting email lists and nonspaming users I would more okay with it. Problem is how do you tell a list server from a spammer?
I think the best solution eleminate adress spoofing. Then spammers can tracked down and sued for harrasment.
Yeah, and what ISP companies are you talking about? Maybe dial-up services, but that’s just because nobody wants dial-up anymore. I certainly don’t see Comcast lowering there monthly rate any time soon for HSI. It just keeps on going up, and up, and up…
So now you’ve got an email tax. Now underground email services will be made illegal. So now you need more laws to go after “them”. Then you’ll hear stories about college kids getting arresting for having an email server in their dorm. This kind of bullshit is not something I want regulated by the government. There’s too much already.
Pointless, in any case. Spammers would use servers situated in some foreign country where there’s no tax.
This tax will also prevent my friends from sending me those “Send this e-mail to 20 people” e-mails.
If the charge could actually be applied, then I would be all for it.
What’s a penny? If the message isn’t worth one cent as far as the sender is concerned, why waste the time of those receiving it?
Why not make it analogous to the 1-900 telephone numbers with the fee paid to the recipient of the email? If the receiver desired to rebate the fee they could, but no messages would be delivered without a deposit to their account.
What starts as .01 will soon be .10 and will then go to $.25 and so on. Plus it will cost good Ol Uncle Sam much more than that to collect, monitor, and police the program. We don’t need another stinking government program.
Bad idea.
Reality check here. Spammers don’t generally use their own computers to send spam, they hijack servers and home users all over the world and use these computers. Adding a 1 cent per email tax will just cost the victims.
personally I would tell them to suck rhino dick before I would pay even that 01 cent.
Exactly, I think that’s how it should work. Legitimate emails would cost you nothing, since presumably the people you email would send the charge back.
This would basically eliminate that problem, since you personally would receive the payment for emails received.
One problem with this is currency value/standardization. Presumably, the email charge would globally be constant. But 0.01 USD is more powerful in most countries than it is in the U.S.; somehow a fair standard would have to be reached. It seems to me, though, that if this program were ever actually implemented, after a little while, spammers would find spamming unmanageably expensive and spam would die out, and after that, very few people would actually be paying the email charge, so the exact price would really be moot.
Personally, although it would require an extensive overhaul of the current system, I think this is a good idea, much better than a tax paid to the government or a fee that is paid to the ISP. With the latter, there’s always the problem that a single provider/government can undermine the whole system by not cooperating. On the other hand, with the former, the only person someone can harm by non cooperating is him-/herself.
I think it is a rediculously stupid idea.
For one thing, the cost of implementation for all isp’s, private hosts etc - how exactly would it be tracked?
Obviously somewhere there would need to be a central system to which all other systems reported. This would call for new software etc etc etc; the cost of all this alone virtually guarentees that the postage would have to be more than 1 cent just to pay for it all. Not to mention the privacy issues - ‘we have records that indicate you sent an email on such and such date to so and so’. Once there is a system in place to track postage, its pretty easy from there to track anything else about that email that you would want to track.
I pay postage when I send snail mail to cover the cost of the service. Having my own domain and my own email server, Im allready paying for my own email postage. Who the hell do I owe 1 cent to?