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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.'"
However, if ISPs are the ones paying for bandwidth... how would a "tax" help, per se? Should ISPs charge for email? And, if so, won't spammers overseas still get away with things? (Actually, with taxes, they do too.)
http://saveie6.com/
thats a really good idea :-/
what about mailing lists? i'm on several, and its not uncommon for me to get several hundred emails per day...
why are there so many fools in the world...
[sigh]
Ok, so maybe people signing up to a list would have to pay for the messages they receive... but now we're basically talking micropayments!
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Some of us still run mailing lists to connect a group of friends- who pays then? It is a perfectly legitimate use... but it seems scary if I'm would have to register my mailing list to get an 'exemption'
I think the biggest failing in this is that to tax email would require a massive change to the email infrastructure- just send all email through your government approved relay. Sure- they won't look at it... putting this on top of SMTP- I don't think it would work- what would be the incentive to use it (other than possibly spam free email)?
I run ampfea.org. We have been an open, free, highly communicative community for the last 6 years, surviving solely on contributions (donations) made by members to keep our services alive. We've done okay with it, but it hasn't been easy at times.
Now, adding *tax* to our e-mail (most of our forums are based on mailing list traffic) would completely cut down on the ability for members to communicate freely. Tax on e-mail is a *BAD* idea.
There are plenty of effective ways to deal with the SPAM problem. Tax is not one of them. Tax is never a solution to any problem.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I probably sound like a broken record, but a plan like this one closes the door on lots of legitimate uses of email.
Thousands of email lists such as those hosted on Sourceforge would be shut down by a plan like this one, as well as killing lists like the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which sends millions of messages a year.
Also gone would be the days of the open mailing list, where people can send a message to the list without being subscribed, as is common in the open source world.
In short, this proposal guarantees that the only people able to use legitimate email lists will be large companies with the budget to spam. I got an unsolicited email from Wachovia this morning, apparently since I had a First Union account, they turned on all the marketing "spam me" options in my profile when the two merged.
I don't see how this tax will deter these semi-legitimate corporate spammers.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
this taxation neglects the issues of virii that install smpt servers on John Q. Average's computer trhu which spam gets sent. Kinda hard to tax.
,if such a bill passes, I can imagine tons of new virii popping up that use VB to send daisy chaned spam from one client to another.
Additionally
Whitelists are the way to go for me.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The problem to begin with is that spammers falsify their headers. Therefore under this plan, innocent people would get stuck with a tax bill. If there was a simple automatic process to trace the origin of spam to its source, then we could do that to begin with and simply block the true sender.
In other words, in order to properly implement a tax, we'd have to have already solved the spam problem, which would make the tax superfluous.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Taxation is only rational when the government actually provides a service. I realise that at the end of the posting, it said that revenues would go towards increasing bandwidth (like anybody believes that), but right now there are thousands of kilometers of dark fibre -- bandwidth ain't the issue.
To put forward idea that we pay taxes on e-mail is to display your ignorance of how e-mail works. If I set up an e-mail server at my own expense, and send an e-mail through it to another server, set up at the recipients own expense, I fail to see where the government's services come into it. After running a few traceroutes to my most common e-mail destinations, all the hops belonged to corporations, not the government.
And those are just the techno-political reasons why taxes don't make sense. What about internation e-mails. I live/work in Canada, but a lot of our business is international (States, UK, etc).
I also don't think that the spam-killers-for-hire is a good idea either (difficult to regulate, and a good chance of a lot of innocent bystanders getting hurt.)
I personally like signed e-mails, and much stiffer penalties for spammers. This may seem like a soft solution, but laws end up being the last recourse. As many on Slashdot jump at pointing out, technological barriers are easily overcome, especially by a large group of determined people.
The idea that one could tax email per letter (not per bandwidth) is inane at best. It means that people will actually stop sending smaller email, the kind that really improves the ability to quickly communicate and respond to communications, and beyond that an effort will be made to economize on a business scale, by getting the most value for your 1 cent (video clips being emailed).
As a second issue, how does the government tax foreign entities for email? And who do you tax, when spam is notoriously made difficult to trace?
And beyond that, I can imagine the dozens, if not thousands, of hackers, just waiting to have this sort of incentive to develop a better SMTP, one that solves many of the problems and loopholes that SMTP currently causes.
Also the article suggests that the federal government should be creating an Federal sales tax on internet purchases. Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought I already paid state tax. Atleast I do with any company that is doing business properly. This doesn't seem different than the old style catalog sales, where you order something out of state to avoid tax. I know Apple charges state tax in NY.
Really for a publication called the financial times, this is not a very financially sensible or reality based article. it seems to be written by someone whose only experience in the internet is reading about it.
Income tax was originally outlawed in the U.S. It was deemed necessary at some point, but only the extremely wealthy had to pay so it was accepted. Now look where we are. Yes, it may start out at one cent per e-mail (or even a fraction of a cent per e-mail), but what happens if that's "not effective enough" or "costs of bandwidth go up"?
I have no
Spam is a natural result of an unregulated network. The reason the Internet is so interesting and creative is because it's unregulated. You have to take the rough with the smooth. Sure, get angry at the spammers, prosecute them even. But don't think about restricting freedoms just because it's convenient to do so: that's what DMCA is about, and the Patriot act, and all the dozens of other stupid "anti-terrorist" laws that countries around the world are implementing right now.
Give me freedom, or give me death. I'll take the spam.
Why should 99% of the people have to pay because 1% are fucking it up for everyone else?
All an email tax gets you... IS SPAM.
Look at the direct mailers filling the land fills with credit card offers and other equally unneed things.
Their business model INCLUDES the mailing cost cost (less than what you can pay) and the print costs. The USPS helps them to get in business.
Last I heard 80% of all mailings was junk mail.
Now a tax to send email... The ISP gets a cut, so they can increase network bandwidth. We pay as users to increase network bandwidth. They SPAMERS would pay too, it is included in their costs.
So what do you get... The same model as the USPS.
Now that shows why a price per email is not going to stop anything.
Isn't part of the point of email that it might want to be anonymous? Do you really want the government having records of each and every email you've sent so that they can collect taxes on it?
I guess with presidential politics already starting it was inevitable that people would start putting forward ideas to combat spam in the political arena. My first question on this is why would I pay the government anything to send email, since neither state nor federal agencies have anything to do how I process email. They don't provide bandwidth, servers, or even oversight. The author's suggestion that this money could be used to "The proceeds could go to maintain and expand bandwidth." is patently ridiculous since the government doesn't provide bandwidth, private companies do. The next issue is just how would you even implment this? Most of the spam that our servers process comes from places that US can't tax, and I imagine that if this was implemented, then the remaining spam would quickly move to places that aren't known for cooperating with US courts & extradition. There is a reason that Sharman Networks (the folks who own Kazaa) are incorporated
in Vanuatu
The only thing that we can do that isn't a band aid or a un-enforcable law is look at how to rewrite the SMTP protocol, right now it is far too easy (by design) to send email from anywhere to anywhere without any accountability. We need a system that allows for servers to positively identified (something similar to a secure cert, not that I want to hand more money to Verisign but...) Then its up to the individual admin to decide what to do with email from a un-certified server; accept it, rate limit it, tag it, or deny it. Now no one _wants_ to rewrite all of the MTA's in the world, but at least this gives a way for non-compliant servers to get mail processed until everyone has gotten their's updated.
Looks like the spammers are winning their guerrilla war, then. We're suggesting responding with disproportionate force in a way that puts the main burden on noncombatants -- always the sign you're about to lose something like this.
I mean, we'd be throwing a huge burden on a system that basically works in order to go after abusers who've already shown they're not going to give up in an arms race for their survival. Good thinking. It's not like spammers would try to, say, abuse other people's servers to send messages without an attributable (read: taxable) source on them. No way. They wouldn't think of that one, no precedent for that... Or were we creating a big new policing division of the U.S. Postal service to defend e-mail servers?
Seriously, how wrongheaded is this? Extremely. It'd be impossible to administer and track without seriously degrading the flexibility and increasing the cost of e-mail systems we have right now on the cheap. How many times has your address changed? Who's tracking your tax bill across all those? Etc. etc. etc. Classic blindered thinking -- a pet idea we should pat on the head and move past. (Exactly how does this tax get collected across borders? Person hasn't addressed the international nature of the internet. Person suggests a "progressive" version, flying in the face of 20-some years of U.S. taxation trends. And so on.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
IMHO, a better idea, compared to imposing taxes on email, would be to create a new infrastructure for exchanging of "email", where things like forged headers, open relays and spammers would be a thing of the past. What I'm thinking of is essentially a new TCP port, a new service, a new daemon, designed from scratch, one that takes all the concerns of today, does some forecasting for the future, and makes us forget about spam for a few years. Something that uses certificates from a few select (trusted) authorities to verify connecting server's identity (kinda like caller-ID, you only answer the calls you want to allow) -- SSL is an accepted way for us to verify the identity of the website we're trying to connect to, why couldn't it be a way to verify the identity of the server trying to connect to us? And throw in some encryption into the mix so that the traffic can't be \easily\ snooped. Rogue servers would quickly get their act together if they started to have mail queue up because their certs were expired / bad etc.
I think that trying to get an old medium to conform to today's demands might be more expensive (taxes or no taxes) than to simply coming up with a new one. A well-designed (and I don't claim to have one) solution would take less time to implement and I think would be easier to manage.
I understand that SSL, encryption and such would not be music to Dept. of Homeland Security's ears, that they would much rather leave the burden and cost on us, but there would be some upsides from their vantage point, too -- there would be less traffic for them to sift through (though it would be more intensive to process it), and I'm sure they'd get their back-door tentacles into the architecture somehow.
I won't even get into arguments like "how do you tax someone who's out of your jurisdiction", or "how do you get thousands of sysadmins try to add SSL to sendmail/qmail/pick-your-MTA without breaking backward-compatibility" etc. Just like gopher and ftp have/are becoming things of the past, I think SMTP should too.
Have EVDO, will travel.
Spammers just can't afford to sign their mails - with any signature.
Spam is one email being sent out a million times. Identical copies of messages flood a network. (If you don't believe this, I'll show you a spam I recently received which had over a thousand entries in the CC field. The spammer accidentally CCd instead of BCCd.)
If you're sending a million copies of one message, you only need one PGP signature. It becomes a fixed one-time fee per different email you send out, not a per-message CPU tax.
Now that viruses will make people unlucky to get caught with them pay alot =(
Also, that this tax thing may trigger to make more viruses to flood out mails from innocent computers.
I was once for the idea, but after a thought, no.
Income tax was originally outlawed in the U.S. It was deemed necessary at some point, but only the extremely wealthy had to pay so it was accepted. Now look where we are.
:)
That's okay, the democrats say only the rich pay income taxes or benefit from tax cuts, so you're OBVIOUSLY rich... =)
I assume you've written your representative and asked them to support HR25, the Fair Tax Bill of 2003?
And that you vote Libertarian?
In addition, spammers would try to workaround those taxes, and possibly succeed, just like they forge the headers of spam they send today. As a result, legimate users would pay the tax and spammers would send the spam for free. Adding some heavy-weight bureaucracy to the problem (tax system) isn't the solution.
The idea in A Bounty on Spammers article seems like a one possible way to go. It's not perfect because it doesn't get rid of the wasted bandwidth immediatly as it doesn't outlaw spam, only spam that isn't clearly marked as spam. I'm not entirely sure about the $10000 bounty the article suggests. I think it should be proportional to the number of spams sent -- say, $5 per spam sent. And make that $50 per spam sent if the spammer tried to forge headers! It would really hurt to send one million spams with forged headers unlike today.
Once we have [ADV:] in every spam we get, we can modify SMTP servers to return "555 Advertisements not allowed" if one tries to send a spam and save some wasted bandwidth.
Alternatively, once we get micropayments work, we can allow spammers to send spam that transfers some money to the reader once he reads the spam. Because sending spam doesn't cost anything, the spammer could choose to pay some small amount of money to get the receiver to read the spam.
Perhaps some poor guy could make a living reading spam?_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
This is how some of the greatest blunders in the world get created, when people instinctively react without thoroughly analyzing a problem and the pros and cons of each potential solution.
What in the world does the government have to do with bits being sent from one computer to another, and why should the government automatically get money for it without my consent? What if the machines were all within an intranet wholly owned by me? Of course the risk of spam would be much less, but try to see the point because some will unfairly (and very unreasonably) be taxed. A blanket process like that would, in the long run, only be of benefit to one person - Uncle Sam. Not the consumer.
I also highly doubt that these taxes can possibly be collected while also maintaining the anonymity of sender and receiver.
And rather than pay Uncle Sam indefinitely each time I send an e-mail, I would much rather invest that money in anti-spam software. That seems to make much more sense to me.
So you know, the original income tax was first instituted to help fund the civil war, at 1/2% tax. It was later repealed, as it was found unconstitutional in the courts for the government to tax income.
But congress tried again in 1913, and was a 1% tax on the top 1% wage earners (in 1913, those that earned $3k to $20k per year).
Fast forward to today, and take a look at how far we've let the government tax our earnings... today, the top 1% wage earners pay 38.6% of their salary in taxes, accounting for ~ 29% of the total (top 5% wage earners paid 50% of all taxes in 1999)
Now we have people saying, "I don't mind paying $0.01 for my emails"... What restraint has the government ever shown that next year it'll be $0.02, then $0.05 (who'll miss a nickle?), a dime... And where the hell will all this money go? into improving the internet infrastructure? Nooo, that's a private business. The money and accountability will disappear, probably into Medicare, Social Security, and all the other social programs that government isn't supposed to be in.
Government control is not a road we want to walk down folks. Yes, control of communications through taxation. I can't understand why the crowd complains when little things are being taken away, and the same people just turn around and hand the big ones over willingly.