EU Considers Taxing SMS Messages, Email 314
An anonymous reader writes to mention a Reuters article about a proposed EU tax on email and phone messages. From the article: "In Italy, the concept of a tax on texting was floated in the past, as a way to help offset the country's huge deficit, although it was flatly rejected by the outgoing government. But Lamassoure argues that with billions of emails and texts sent around the world, it's a novel and simple way to raise funds from new technology. 'Exchanges between countries have ballooned, so everyone would understand that the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU,' he said."
What about an O2 tax? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's not address over-spending (Score:2, Insightful)
As a UK resident... (Score:3, Insightful)
SMS? (Score:2, Insightful)
Look! (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets just hope our populous is ignorant enough to swallow it and realize we're actually levying an excessive tax on something that has ZERO cost to the government in the first place.
But hey, money's money right? I should bring this idea up in the Canadian Parliament, lets get them to impose a tax on every page view on the internet. Not only will we be out of debt in no time, we'll be rich Rich RICH!!!
Oh the fallacies and deceit sitting on a pile of incompetence and idiocy!
Here's a way to fix the deficit (Score:4, Insightful)
When the economy slows down, fire some publicans. When the economy grows, fire more publicans so it can grow more. Start downsizing today, and then downsize tomorrow. Keep downsizing until you've downsized to the point of no more complaints for more money or overstretched budget.
I think there should be a law that says the minute that a government employee complains about his pay or his budget, he gets fired. Roll the money to someone else. When they complain, fire them and keep rolling it over and refunding it to the taxpayers.
I can't believe they want to tax communications more. To me, I believe that the Right to Expression is universal (inherent/God-given/natural), and that taxing expression in any way is regulating a right that can't be regulated.
Tax SMS? (Score:3, Insightful)
This makes no sense whatsoever. Taxing email makes a little sense if they're providing infrastructure, but they probably aren't. Taking SMS makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE however, because the cellphone companies provided 100% of the infrastructure except where they tie into the phone system.
I don't know if european phone system wiring was typically consumer-subsidized as it was here in the USA, but if it was, then the cellphone companies are probably already paying taxes in their bills for trunks, or whatever kind of connections they're using, and as such no additional tax should be levied.
Taxing SMS would be like taxing breathing - the EU has nothing to do with providing either one.
Silliness (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone with a whit of sense has to know that under the current technology there is no way to tax email. If you want to tax the sender, there would have to be a way to absolutely identify the sender of the email, which there's not. If you're going to tax the recipient, then you need to provide recipients a way to decline to receive email that they don't want to pay taxes on (spam), which means you have to have a way to absolutely identify the sender of the email, and there's still not a way to do that.
Re:As a UK resident... (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical of the EU! (Score:1, Insightful)
Fricking Eurocommies (Score:0, Insightful)
A: France.
Re:Silliness (Score:3, Insightful)
How silly of you, the EU already knows who you text-message and e-mail, through the data retention bill [bbc.co.uk] that was passed.
Makes one wonder if the idea is to tax the terrorists out of the EU.
tax the carrier (Score:3, Insightful)
But you can not really tax e-mail. People (i.e. internet providers, and through them people) will move to a different port, different protocol, icu, secret blogs, hidden web pages whatever. In the end you'd have to tax bytes sent on the net.
Re:How about SPAM? (Score:3, Insightful)
The guy wises up and gets the home builder, or himself, to fill in the gaping cracks or finds a better more secure house.
Maybe taxing e-mail is the solution to spam. It smartens up Joe Average or enrages him to the point that something is done about it.
It sure is a shame that e-mail is so cheap that no one really cares about its abuse.
I suppose another method of mail hijacking would be spoofing a USPS "account". I'm sure that must be a federal crime.
Some education... (Score:2, Insightful)
Repeat after me,
"IT IS NOT FREE, IT IS PAID FOR BY TAXES"
Now, proceed to make a half-assed attempt to justify your previous statement and how it is completely contradicted by reality.
Case in point: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What about an O2 tax? (Score:3, Insightful)
A couple of wise men 200 years ago realized this. They made a big stink about it, too...
all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.
Re:As a UK resident... (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, because I can send SMS with my CDMA phone. Maybe GSM was first to have SMS support, but that's like having a Xerox tax on all PCs because Xerox was first with the mouse or whatever.
Also, should we really be thanking the EU for mandating a technologically inferior cell phone standard with a horrible non-backward compatible upgrade path? GSM uses a TDMA over-the-air protocol, which is inherently less efficient that CDMA (super-short explanation--TDMA uses the same amount of bandwidth whether you're talking or not, whereas CDMA uses only what it needs). The upgrade path for GSM is wCDMA, which is not backward-compatible, whereas the upgrade path for CDMA2000 has really nice backward-compatibility.
Re:That's it (Score:3, Insightful)
Norway isn't a member of the EU. But you knew that, right?
Re:Silliness (Score:3, Insightful)
A fair point of discussion.
My comments were regarding the technical feasability of taxing email. Following those, begin to imagine the expense in money and time to make a hack-proof sender identification system for email (either with SMTP or with something else entirely). That expense would be far and away larger than any tax revenue from taxing email, which makes taxing email in the first place completely pointless.
Of course, this is all presuming that the people who make decisions have a whit of sense, which - since they're considering taxing email in the first place - they must not.
Now, do I think taxing email is justifiable as a concept? Doesn't matter one way or another; any such tax will be completely avoided, by way of hiding one's identity or using a different method of communication than SMTP. Don't get me started on "How are you going to tax email sent to/from a geographical area outside your jurisdiction, not that geography really matters on the InterWeb anyway?"
Can't be done, and if it could it would be amazingly costly to execute and easily avoidable. Let's consider it anyway! That's silliness.
Re:Sender (AKA) SPAMMER (Score:3, Insightful)
Money to legislators is like cake to a fat kid.
Re:Sender (AKA) SPAMMER (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the government should cut its spending if it wants to reduce its debt. I'd love to be able just to take someone else's money to pay my own debt off.
These sorts of ideas are what leads to all these fucked up taxes. The debt belongs to the people of the country. The money belongs to the people of the country. The spending is on behalf of the people of the country.
If people started identifying with their government, and had an interest in having the budget work for them rather than being small minded and thinking of how to keep the government from getting any more money out of them, they'd stop thinking of taxes as inherantly evil and participate in making fair and intelligent plans for raising and allocating collective funds for collective problems and obligations.
Governments raise their money by trying as many ways they can to get taxes in, and hopefully some of them slip under the radar and don't get too many people yelling "Nay", then see what they have to work with. It results in massive bureaucracy, wasted money, unbalanced taxation and blown budgets, and it's ALL because of this attitude.
This is a stupid tax. It adds bureaucracy and requires new infrastructure investment, provides a disincentive to communication between people which ALWAYS has a chilling effect on progress, and for all that, it's getting the money from the same source: the people who live there. Digging a new door into the treasury isn't going to get you more money. It's just hard work for nothing.
What the!?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Two, we already pay sales tax on SMSs when the bill come through, and a stealth tax because phone companies need to claw back the money they spent on licencing next-gen radio bands though there most profitable area, SMS messages.
Three, theve got some fucking cheek "benefits engendered by the EU" lets see, apart from licencing bands to companies at insane prices, I don't think theve done anything... The benefit engendered by the EU, is we pay more for our SMSs, other than that you can get SMSs pretty much anywhere in the world where there's enough people to justify mobile phone coverage.
Re:Sender (AKA) SPAMMER (Score:3, Insightful)
If people started identifying with their government
Ah, but which government?
Here in Britain we now have "the Government", meaning Tony Blair and his cronies at Westminster, and then a whole bunch of other talking shops - notably more popular among politicians than other people. There is the Scottish parliament, the Welsh parliament, various ex terrorists and their friends doing nothing much in Northern Ireland (which is possibly the point), and the EU over in Brussels. Not to mention the UN.
Every one of these entities - except the one in Northern Ireland - feels a need to justify its existence, to make its mark on people's lives. This costs money - especially for the EU, which among other things likes to be seen as the generous provider of subsidies to all and sundry.
When all these politicians stop inventing jobs for themselves, and start trying to do the real, necessary jobs properly and responsibly, the rest of us might start to support them - maybe even vote for mainstream party candidates again.