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Minnesota Senator Says Email Tax Might Reduce Spam
indros13 writes "The Hon. Mark Dayton, Senator from Minnesota, is reportedly considering a "miniscule email tax" to counter the flood of spam. Thinking like an economist, he's obviously hoping to make mass emailing unprofitable. 'You can't say, "We want it to be totally free and unrestricted and on the other hand we want it to work smoothly and civilly," he said.' No word on how all those lobbying groups that use mass emails will respond, but I'm sure there are a few emails on the way..." Politician weasel words are part of the package, though; Dayton says a tax is "just one of the tactics that should be considered, but I don't favor it at this time."
Interesting how everyone who thinks there should be a tax on email thinks that the money should go to their organization or government.
;^)
"Leave it alone," [Norquist] said. "If the government gets involved, they will mess it up."
Agreed. The point is that if "little" things like this are allow, then it's basically saying "Look, Verisign, commercializing the internet is the solution like you said!"
I likes my SpamAssassin, thanks
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Taxing murders might stop murders.
Taxing childbirth might stop overpopulation.
Give me a fucking break.
This won't work. To send letters in the mail is the cost of the material, the envelope, and obviously the stamp. The US postal service has continually upped the price of sending letters, yet I seem to get MORE of those 1024 free AOL hours CD's now than ever before, and they are getting bigger and heavier and cost more to send out. I doubt a tax on sending emails will have much of an effect on spam. Spam is already SO much cheaper than snail mail, and snail mail spam still happens. I would argue that even if we levied a 37 cent tax on every email that we still would have a large amount of spam. Besides, how the hell do you enforce such a policy? Especially when emails can be sent within a particular ISP from the spammer to users with no real way for the goverment to get in there and inforce such a payment plan. This just won't work.
Will Stokes Album Shaper http://albumshaper.sf.net
Clearly the guy is pretty clueless about email or only ever receives it from his mother down the road. How does he expect to tax email from ... wait...
outside the USA? Hold the emails in some large mail spooler at the border and send a bill to the people in the foreign countries? Christ , how do people
this dumb ever get elected? Oh
Two points:
If you want to make it unprofitable, sue the corporations that always wind up the object of the advertisement (Norton WhateverWorks always show up in my box 2-200 times per week). If they don't fund the spammers, some of their incentive dries up.
Anyone caught co-opting another CPU to turn it into a proxy should be prosecuted and sent to prison. The ROI on that taxpayer money would be much better than putting some teenage file-sharer in prison!
Besides that, it's all just data. You can't tax some packets and not others - people will just develop new protocols to avoid the taxes. Unfortunately you have to understand the technology to make sensible rules governing its use.
and if the rest of humanity is too stupid to do a 10 minute google search then I'm not paying for it. You want to stop spammers? Use a decent filtering scheme.
Same thing as with drug, gun, and sex ed. If the vast majority of people weren't so damn irresponsable and stupid then they'd be able to handle either not using drugs or using them responsabily (not only does this apply to marajuana, but also the likes of prozak), certain guns wouldn't need to be outlawed because some dumbfuck would press the trigger by accident and off his entire family. And finally, our kids would not only know where and when sex is ok, but why it is ok and how to make love responsabily.
Either way, if he passes a e-mail tax law, I'll just setup something else that isn't spammable like a VPN between my house and my family members that transmits txt documents into a local folder. Mabye that way the idiots who use the system won't open up sobig viruses and help to make virus problems worse.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
What, excatly speaking, is e-mail ? If it's defined as "messages delivered by the SMTP protocol", all one needs to do to avoid the tax is to invent a new protocol (or use instant messaging, for example). If it's defined as "messages delivered by computers", then it would kill Slashdot, for starters...
In any case, it would be the end of free email lists. Probably newsgroups too, since they would be the next logical step.
Of course, all this is assuming such a tax can actually be enforced, which is unlikely. Nevertheless, if e-mail becomes non-free, it's one more reason to hate spammers - thank you, parasites, for ruining a good thing for everyone.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
on a more serious note, is there a legal definition of what is spam? i consider anything about M$ Windows based products to be spam because i use a Mac, but i am sure to somebody it may be useful information.
Spammers are already using viruses and hacked accounts to send the email. They won't be paying the tax the victim will.
Even from a strictly legal point of view, the US government can't tax e-mail sent out from the country -- export duties are expressly forbidden by the Constitution.
Just what we need to burnish America's international image: an anti-spam policy that specifically exempts Americans who spam furriners.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I think the industry as a whole would be *MUCH* better off looking for a technical solution rather than hoping for government intervention. Plus, the internet is multinational, so it's a hopeless task for the government to do anything about it. "The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions" pretty much sums up this article.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
World-wide or what?
Any local, state, or even federal tax would be absolutely useless, other than as a revenue tool. A nationwide (U.S.) tax on email may slow or stop U.S. spammers (provided they are using U.S. ISPs, etc.), but in effect it would just "outsource" spamming to other countries that did not have a tax.
If there were a world-wide tax, it would probably work to at least reduce spam, but you and I both know that there will always be a hold-out country somewhere that would make the whole idea useless.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Regular mail "costs" 37 cents, but every day I get a stack of flyers in my mailbox that are metered or something, and they come from multiple sources. Charging for email will generate a lot of revenue, but just like raising the postage stamp rate, it will have 0 effect on spam.
stuff |
Washington, DC Office
SR-346, Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, District of Columbia 20510
Phone: 202-224-3244
Fax: 202-228-2186
remind him that most spammer send spam illegally and never pay for it in the first place.
take a moment to flood him with calls.
let him no he should not even MENTION such an idea in public. The roots will take hold otherwise!
again:
Phone: 202-224-3244
Fax: 202-228-2186
it just takes a moment.
taxes won't stop criminals and scum. we already know spammers are evasive, they will just wheedle a way around the taxes the same way they wheedle into open relays and use foreign hosting.
if the government want's to do something, let them prosecute. most spammers live in the us and canada. in almost all the spamm i've ever seen their is enough fraud and misrepresentation in each email to at least bring charges in civil court with current laws.
Spammers tailor the stream of bytes to get into other people's computers, bypassing various measures the owners have taken to keep them out.
Actually, they usually just send a flood of emails to the address you entered when you signed up for that annoying e-card you though was so clever at the time. That, or use brute-force dictionary attacks. There's surprisingly little byte manipulation going on, unless you count header-forging, and I'm not sure if that completely applies.
Spam is mostly about business - about keeping an ad in your face when you dont want it. Just because you impose a tax on it doesnt mean it will deter a person who wants to sell something - For Example, if someone wanted to sell used cars which go for $10000 a pop, what is a $500 email-spam tax for him ? Basic point is that there will always be something which will ultimately be profitable by spamming. Sure, it might stop the average sunday spammer, but i thought my yahoo spam guard already did that.
The problem of spam is already a problem of laws going unenforced against an entrenched criminal element. While spamming itself may not be explicitly illegal, the act of spamming is not separable from acts which are illegal, such as fraud, conversion, and theft of services. Many (including some spammers) are under the misapprehension that because these laws go unenforced, spam is thereby legal. Indeed, the problem of enforcement is so bad that blatantly destructive acts such as denial-of-service attacks against anti-spam services have gone utterly uninvestigated by law enforcement. (This may be changing.)
It is utterly unnecessary to create further laws which penalize ordinary Net users, in an effort to stop spammers. Indeed, such laws simply aggravate the problem already posed by spam: increasing the bother, inconvenience, and expense of using and operating the mail system. In effect, such laws would help the spammers destroy email.
Just think, you subscribe to 5 high-volume mailing lists and participate heavily. You send out 300+ messages daily. Suddenly your fee gets substantial!
And if you work as user support for a small company, replying by email? Suddenly costs of operating rapidly rise. You operate a free web forum, where people subscribe and an automated reply sends them their password, and optionally get email notifications on changes in threads they watch. Your forum can't be free anymore.
I can think of a dozen other legitimate uses for sending bulk amounts of emails. Even with $0.01/email, with one email a day for some 500 users, that makes $150/month. Can easily kill any free service.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"Dayton said legislators will keep looking for the right balance between a low-cost service free from government control and a system without annoyances like spam."
/., but at least he is understands that it is a problem costing us time and productivity, and is looking for ways to assist us in stemming the flow.
First of all, the Do-Not-Call registry is a wildly popular government intervention. Legisaltors, seeing a win, are looking at ways of solving their constitants problems with the tool they have available: the law. That is their job. They are responding to calls by citizens to do something about spam.
Maybe they are not the right people to do something about spam. If you read the article, or the above statement, they seem to be aware that they are not the right people to do something about spam. Did you read the article?
This is an unthinking, knee-jerk reaction. Senator Dayton is responding to a problem, by talking about it and thinking about it. The gist of what he says is true: Spam is huge because the costs are miniscule. There needs to be a change in the economics of Spam.
He might not have the requisite genius to post on
Read critically, why don't you? Yes, taxing e-mail is barking mad, which is why Sen Dayton "stressed that he is not advocating it", which is alo why the reporter brought it to the for in her article. New taxes from a Minnisota Senator, that's good copy.
You don't get it. All this Senator is doing is trying to make a name for himself. Come re-election tim "I played an important role in fighting spam, introducing inovative bills in washington..blah blah blah." As dumb as these people sound, they are not idiots. You just can't be that stupid and get so far at politics. What they do know, however, is that their constituency are more or less pretty dumb.
This really isn't a whole lot different on the plastic gun ban, requiring something like 1.5 ounces of metal in a gun, when at the same time they only gun that came close had over a pound of metal in it!
And what happens when your getting twice the ammount of spam after an e-mail tax is imposed? "Its a good thing I was able to fight spam, but we need more money and are going to have to fight harder" or maybe some isps will start improving on their filtering, and the technically uniclined will just think that it was the tax, or whatever bill.
Considering that they don't use their own names, their own email accounts, SMTP servers or much of anything else that's tracable (there would be acts of violence if we could get our rightously indignated hands on 'em,) just who is this bozo proposing pay this tax?
Somebody buy 'm a clue.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
There is no good intention here. Let's say the tax passes. Spam is reduced because they don't want to pay the tax. The tax, however, is in place. Who is paying it? WE ARE! Are they going to repeal the tax now that only the innocent are paying it? NO! See, a new teat was spawned and their are "social programs" that depend on that new tax. When someone tries to repeal that tax, they will be dubbed "uncaring" and "anti-children." Furthermore, we'll hear the usual "Who is going to pay for the e-mail tax cut!?"
This is where anti-spam legislation will lead us.
First we'll have the $0.00001 per email tax. It will fail, but we're told its failing because enforcement doesn't work when you don't know where the SMTP servers are. Which means that we'll have a law requiring SMTP server registration, enforced by the IRS and your ISP.
Forget to pay your SMTP tax when setting up your new box? Good news! The IRS can now search your hard disk (gotta know how much untaxed mail you sent) and then file tax liens against your bank account and your home.
When these don't work, we'll be told that the tax rate isn't high enough. So they'll raise it. And keep raising it. And then someone will figure out that it's a great way to put PCs in poor neighborhoods or some other "worthy" project.
Have I mentioned Ashcroft's take on SMTP registration?
Enforce the fraud laws. Arrest the people behind SPAM products. Ensnare the spammers as part of the conspiracy. That will solve the problem. Everything else just takes away our rights AND or money.
..and in other news, today a man was fined half a million dollars and jailed for five years for evading email taxes. IRS agents say that Joseph Smith of One Horse, Nebraska filed fraudulent SMTP logs and is suspected of having had encrypted tunnels to email servers in tax havens abroad. Reportedly, the prosecutor is also looking to charge him with evading the new web-page-hit tax, after his legal defense fund page was posted to the popular news site "Microsoft Slashdot".
Attorney general for life John Ashcroft commented "too late, assholes. In twenty oh three you let the camel get his nose in the tent, and now he's screwing your wife."
I run an email server. For the family. Total of four email addresses. My server directly delivers to other servers. How is this to be taxed?
Obviously, the computer SENDING the email pays the tax. But this means that some form of compliance checking will have to be put into place. Which means a change to the email protocols. But, other countries may not comply. Of course, running an email service for sending may simply be declared illegal, forcing all emails through a centralized point. This solution also has its problems. I guess the tax revenue collected could be used to run the central email servers.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Want a politician who actually hears what people are saying to him and tries to problem-solve about it with a certain amount of candor? Here's your guy. ("Weasel words" are not usually how you'd describe a politician who says he'd consider a new tax but the approach doesn't seem practical.) The article's slant is obvious, but underneath that you see a range of possible approaches to the SPAM problem -- and various members of congress saying they're skeptical about how any of them would work, just like you seem to be.
Except, of course, you haven't heard all the testimony on the subject they have. You haven't even read the article.
I guess you'd like someone who'll cover his butt so that he's never misrepresented, instead. Maybe you'd be interested in someone who "talks tough" about taxes but shows the fiscal responsibility of my ten-year-olds with a Discover card? Maybe (s)he'll even mention this in campaign ads: "Mark Dayton wants to tax everything. Death. E-mail... He wants to tax the whole world..." (I know, that last bit's the sort of peurile hyperbole you see in campaign ads all the time... but you just made it, didn't you?)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
An email is a message in a well known format composed a sequence of TCP/IP packets, usually but not always sent via a port 25 socket on an SMTP server, and usually but not always retrieved from a POP3 or IMAP server.
As the expressed intent is not to to punish recipients, the notion of taxing retrieval of emails is dismissed out of hand. Only the sending and relaying will be considered.
An SMTP server can be configured to handle email from anybody (an open relay) either deliberately or through incompetence or malice. Some SMTP server can be configured to require authorisation before handling email. Some SMTP servers are configured to only accept or send email to certain domains. Some SMTP servers are hidden (successfully or otherwise) on non-standard ports, behind firewalls, or are only accessible via (e.g.) SSH encrpyted connections. Some SMTP servers handle email only for a specific organisation, or for a specific machine.
SMTP servers are freely available for most computer platforms. Most linux distributions, for example, come with one or more SMTP servers as standard, there are several free SMTP servers avaiable for Windows, many email viruses contain their own SMTP servers to propagate themselves, or a simple SMTP server can be written in a few dozen lines of code or script.
Anyone connected to the internet anywhere in the world can set up an SMTP server and provide services to anyone they like. This may be against the acceptable use policy of their internet service provider (ISP), and their ISP may try to prevent it by technical means such as blocking the well known SMTP port 25, but there are ways to disguise the traffic or bypass these restrictions, including relaying to open SMTP servers on non standard ports and/or using SSH tunnels. Spammers can set up their own SMTP servers rather than using their ISP's servers, or can find and use open SMTP relays based anywhere in the world.
There is no practical way to oblige or enforce taxation on the administrator of an email server. Large US based ISPs could conceivably be taxed, but spammers commonly use open relays or their own SMTP servers. These can be based anywhere in the world. How will US legislation enforce taxation in Russia, for example? As a futher issue, at what level does email attract taxation? When it is being sent anywhere in the world? When it is being sent within the US? When it is sent from outside the US to servers inside the US? When it is sent within a subset of the internet, like a corporate or academic network, which can comprise tens of thousands of users? At the individual machine level?
Email is relayed across SMTP servers. In theory, it would be possible to tax the receiving SMTP servers of US based, large corporate ISPs and have them bill the sender. In practice, ISPs would be unable to collect this, and would in any case have to have accounts for every possible sender. This would lead to them either: rejecting email from the vast majority of non-US ISPs and being rejected in turn, effectively cutting the US off from the email network; or more likely, passing the costs on to the US based individual recipient either directly or indirectly.
In summary, Senator Dayton, the only practical way to keep the internet safe for Americans is to wall off part of it and declare a Fortress USA.
Any ISP who wanted to do that could do it right now. AOL could do it tomorrow. They have, for example, repeatedly experimented with rejecting email that appears to come from SMTP servers that don't appear to match the registered SMTP servers (well, their IP addresses) for the apparent sender's domain name. The reason why I repeat "apparent" is that these factors can be faked by malicious spammers, but that they catch out many legitimate senders, to the point where this policy has been unenforcable.
Thank you, Senator Dayton, for your interest in these matters, and for taking the time to suggest a superficial knee jerk solution that would wreck the internet as we know it beyond repair. I suggest that you sack whatever idiot nephew you employ as a researcher and take some actual advice on this issue before you do some real damage.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If the Federal Government is going to pass any law that addresses spam, it should be a law that says that every user of email is required to use a Bayesian filter. That would lead to a virtually zero response rate within months which would lead to spam going away. And, wow, all without new taxes!
.
The Federal Government should stay out of it. With or without a tax, a new law would cost money. You'd need enforcement to ensure that the tax is paid (or, in your example, the Bayesian filter is installed), etc . .
In the end, the Feds would bungle every aspect of any attempted law (except maybe collecting the tax -- they're good at that).
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
I think they're just fishing for ways to boost revenue. Right on its face, this idea suffers the same problem that plagues many other legislative "solutions" - the only people that are really penalized are going to be the ones that have nothing to do with the problem itself. True to form, it's no different than Bashcroft talking about how the U.S. is going to fight Al-Qaeda and terrorism by spying on every American Citizen and trampling all over the Constitution. In other words, the problem, and the proposed "solution" have nothing in common.