E-mail Tax As Way Of Preventing Spam

scubacuda writes "This FT article criticizes current attempts to regulate spam. Re: Lessig's bounty-on-spammer proposal: 'This is a terrible idea that will make millionaires of two classes of people: reprobates who illegally maraud through others' hard drives; and those who have built their expertise about spam by peddling it, 'He considers the recent FTC spam conference "barking up the wrong tree," and thinks that the simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax: 'This requires smashing some myths....But, very soon, the Internet should turn into a penny post, with a levy of 1 cent per letter. This would cost the average e-mailer about $10 a year. Small companies would pay bills in the hundreds of dollars; very large ones in the thousands. And spammers would be driven to honest employment. The tax could be made progressive by exempting, say, those who sent fewer than 5,000 letters a year. The proceeds could go to maintain and expand bandwidth.'"

Comments

Tax Jurisdictions abroad?

[Mewf]

So what happens if I, a resident in Spain, wish to send email via a British mailserver to an American recipient? This is somethign I actually do regularly, as well as recieve email stored on a UK POP account. Where do I pay the tax? Could spammers just get around it by using offshore mailservers in countries that won't bother to put in a tax?

Hell, thinking about it, how would you define the sendign of email? A quick traceroute to my ISP's SMTP server shows that the packets from my machine get to that server via france, the UK, The netherlands, and belgium. This is *before* I even start esending the email. Would I end up having to pay 1 Eurocent to each of these jurisdictions just because my ISP doesn't have a local peering agreement with its ADSL provider?

The internet is a global phenomenon. Stop thinking in terms of US only.

Re:Is taxation best?

[gurps_npc]

So they charge each person $4/year to be on their list, redo their service to send a single email once per day and wallah they are done.

Or far more likely, they redo their wastefull service which sends COPIES of the same message to thousands of people with a bulletin board where people log on with a web browser and read the emails there. These crappy little things are BAD ideas of sending out massive emails - it worked fine for when the internet was a primitive thing and no one had any idea how to make a web page but tradition and the lack of thinking is the only thing having people do it that way instead of an obviously more efficent message board method.

This is a FANTASTIC idea that totally solves one problem without putting any real blockage.

People are CERTAINLY willing to pay a low amount of cash As in 1 cent per email, to forever be free of the JUNK that clutters their email.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. The choice is free email as is with spam or the MINOR inconveince