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."
Sender or Receiver? (Score:2, Interesting)
If it's the sender, then this might would be a good way to reduce spam originating from the EU.
How about SPAM? (Score:4, Interesting)
Will be interesting to see them receive a 5 million Euro bill though!
disingenuous, and shows government stupidity (Score:5, Interesting)
Under the aegis of "..., This is peanuts, but given the billions of transactions every day, this could still raise an immense income," he said....,
So, government when faced with a need for money (how often does that happen?) sees that billions of e-mails and text messages are being sent and infers they can and should extract a tiny morsel of blood from their constituents, concluding, "it's only a tiny bit". This is insane.
Better served and directed would be transparency by the government: "This is how much money we need, and this is what it will cost each taxpayer..." At least then the people get a more honest appraisal of what government is doing.
Foisting micro-taxes and micro-debits is also an additional unnecessary burden upon the billing mechanism for an already too complex system of charges.
If this were proposed in the United States, it would be almost singularly enough of a reason to cast my vote against any representative who supported such a scheme.
Wow, real dense here. (Score:2, Interesting)
Already done... (Score:2, Interesting)
Nothing new there
Gtnx
Marcel
Keysian-based Tax Systems Don't Increase Revenue (Score:0, Interesting)
The US tax revenues are higher than they have ever been (by over 25% when adjusted for inflation) despite federal tax decreases for almost all industries and tax brackets.
BRILLIANT! Re:How about SPAM? (Score:2, Interesting)
Since I don't know anyone in the EU I never phone there or send emails anyways. Even if I do the number will be low.
However Capone was tossed in Jail for Tax Evasion so passing a law that taxes those who send emails will hit exactly that part of the spammer world that needs to be hit - and hard!
If it happens to hit some innocent folks who set up open mail gateways, or otherwise connect (willing) unsecured hosts to high speed lines, then I guess this is reasonable collateral damage especially considering the number of evangellical people who are trumpeting solutions and willing to offer free assistance right up to the point of developing (for free) the applications which are far more secure; all the way through to installing same for free and training people in how to use them.
Maybe this is a silver lining!
How to track e-mails for the purpose of taxing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously though, how could you possibly track e-mail without the help of virtually every domain owner? How do you deal with webmail services? If I send an e-mail from a gmail account to a yahoo account then yes it's going over port 25 so it could theoretically be tracked by monitoring systems. But if you send a webmail from one gmail account to another or from one yahoo account to another then the only way you'd know about it is if Google, Yahoo, etc. starts tracking and accounting for all their e-mails.
And then there's the whole issue of spam. Spammers have control of tons of virus/trojan infected PC's that they regularly use to send out their spew. Are end users responsible for paying the taxes on spam sent unknowingly from their PC's? I could see individuals suing the government for knowing about infected PC's and doing nothing about it since those machines are now a source of tax revenue.
And what about personal domains, smaller companies, etc? Unless you force each and every domain owner worldwide to turn over mail logs you'd end up with huge discrepencies in the application of the taxes. Although I don't live in Europe I do own a few of my own domains and run my own mail server. It's used mostly for family accounts. If I lived in the EU then would I be required to keep accounting information and turn it over to the tax authorities? Could I charge them for the time involved in setting this up and regularly turning the logs over to them?
Re:heres an idea.. (Score:3, Interesting)
As for your idea about controlling spam though, I've always thought the way it should work is like this:
1) Do you mind if I contact you via this channel?
2) Nope, not if you mind paying me $x.xx every time you do so.
3) [Latest advert] [$x.xx] in MY bank account
Sender (AKA) SPAMMER (Score:3, Interesting)
I've thought this was a good idea for a long time. Charge it at the net connection to companies or individuals. Privately, I send ~100 emails a month, professionally, ~200 on a busy month. Most of the professional ones are through Intranet, and $1.00 a month isn't going to put me in the hole.
Spammers, on the other hand, try sending in the hundreds of thousands to tens of millions range; $10,000 per batch pretty quickly adds up. Uh-oh, Granny caught a virus, and her PC is a zombie. First, her ISP probably already cut her off, second, make it easy to appeal. Prove (by being an old granny ) your PC is a zombie, the fine is lowered to $100. Teach her her lesson about not installing her virus definitions.
As with any law or tax, it needs to be implemented right, but I would love to see this, especially opposed to a tiered internet (different groups, I know, but same basic comcepts).
Re:As a UK resident... (Score:1, Interesting)
Why so much tax? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've recently found myself explaining to people why the US has added a tax onto their telephone bills to help fund the Spanish/American war, a war which ended over 108 years ago. Why is there an 18% tax on alcohol in Philadelphia to help fund WWII, and other silly rider taxes.
Which brings me to my point.
They'd tax air if they think they could get away with it.
Nope. (Score:3, Interesting)
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.