Slashdot Mirror
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."
The funny thing that these moron legislators don't understand is, if they could collect the tax on mass e-mailing then they could just as likely just outlaw sending UCE entirely and hold the people doing it responsible. The problem is it's nearly impossible to pinpoint who is sending all this garbage. Why would they pay the e-mail tax when they're already conducting fraud?
I've never understood why this isn't something that the OSS community hasn't tried to tackle.
For business purposes, I want an email system that:
1) Is Spam free.
2) Is secure.
3) Is failsafe - i.e. if the recipient doesn't receive the message, I want to know about it.
Surely from a technical perspective, this isn't that difficult?
Why can't the OSS mail clients agree on a standard for doing this. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible, for instance, to have two mail boxes (or whatever you want to call them) for a single email address - one for "secure emails", and the other for the rest. The secure email box would only recieve emails that were from an approved address.
This could be a great way for OSS software to creep into organisations - I could tell my clients, for instance, hey, if you use Thunderbird, we can email each other more securely/without spam/in a failsafe manner. The network effects of this kind of promotion for OSS could be fantastic.
This looks like an opportunity that's going to waste for the OSS community. Come on guys, or people will start saying we don't innovate!
Next, the blog post tax. Hey, it would make trolling far more expensive, right?
Between this story and the story of third world countries wanting the UN to "control" the Internet because IANA is too US-centric, I really get the idea that government-control types really have no clue what the Internet is. If you "regulate" the Internet with taxes, restrictions, etc, another network will rise to take it's place. The main feature of the Internet is relative anarchy (also called freedom). Are there rules on the net? Of course! It's called "consensus"! Deal with it.
You don't get 100 to 200 of those postal mail junk things every day, because of the cost. THAT is what's stopped, not all junk, but most of what would come if it were totally free free free.
There is nothing at all in the mechanisms of sending e-mail to prevent the volume of spam from increasing another 10- or hundred-fold over the next year. Spam volumes under present conditions will only stop increasing when every spammer is spamming at maximum velocity... that's their incentive and it's a vicious cycle as spam crowds mailboxes, causing spammers to send MORE to try to get THEIR messages read.
Economic solutions using real money can work, and needn't cost much for those who are sending legitimate mail. The devil is in the details -- some proposed implementations really suck, others get closer to something that regular people could live with. I would not mind spending 25 cents a month for all the e-mail I send, if the volume of spam could be cut dramatically.
The biggest problem with the economic-using-real-money solutions is that when you distill them down to their essence, it turns out you can implement the same solution WITHOUT using money... and then the problem is revealed to be what it's been all along -- issues of protocols and trust and distributed senders and the reality that many legitimate messages move between strangers (I write to someone I've just met in a meeting), or between systems that don't haven't talked to each other previously (I write to a friend, but via dialup from some place I've traveled to)
And the issue with THAT is that it's considered a given that all the mail servers in all the world cannot be updated at once... that we still need to receive mail from those that aren't updated... and so, the spammers end up using those.
yada yada
anyway, there are economics-based solutions to spam, but they don't necessarily have to involve real money. Using real money makes some things easier because the "system" doesn't have to track credits and debits internally then, anyone can cash out or add funds because the credits and debits are liquid.
The problem with any type of fees like this is that only big spammers and corporations will be able to exploit it. I run a non-profit site that sends out approximately 50,000 emails per months. These emails are REQUESTED by the members of my site as they are updates about transactions they are involved in, notices of responses to messages they've posted in the forums and other items.
I do not make a penny running my site and have to pay most of the cost of the server and the colocation and bandwidth out of my own pocket. Even if they charged one penny per email, I could not afford an extra $500/mo or $6000 per year just for the right to send out email notices to users. I couldn't even afford $50/mo or $600/year if we charged one tenth of a penny per message.
Besides, what about system notices? And who/how will the email fee be collected? And why not just support an alternate RFC to promote more secure email standards like secure SMTP?
If you could track spammers down and collect a tax, then you could just as easily track them down and prosecute them for fraud, which the majority of spammers commit in one way or another. All this would do is tax law-abiding citizens, and encourage more credit card fraud, viruses, trojans and ID theft on the part of Spammers so they could stay anonymous (or pay the tax with someone else's credit card). We need a new branch of government - the IT branch - because no other branch has a clue when it comes to this crap.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
I think the industry as a whole would be *MUCH* better off looking for a technical solution rather than hoping for government intervention.
Ahhha, but what would force the industry to move forward together and adopt a "new" secure public key based electronic mail protocol?
Incompetent government intervention
Yeah baby, bring on the e-mail tax!!
It's clear that if the sender of an email suffered a cost above just paying for the computer and bandwidth, the problem of spam would be mostly eliminated. A fee of even just $0.00005 would cancel out the profits from the typical spam business plan.
But, also clear is that a government mandated tax would be absolutely the wrong way to impose this cost.
If a citizen wants to setup his email client so that all messages from strangers are deleted unless accompanied by a $5.00 paypal donation, that's his business! "Pay for email" can be implemented without government help. If we ever get a functioning micropayment system so that transactions of less than $0.05 can be cheaply exchanged, then it's quite probable that big ISPs (starting with AOL) will let their users elect to block all non-whitelisted emails unless the sender paid a minor fee to compensate for time wasted reading.
If the question is: "Should email require a stamp-like payment?", the answer is maybe.
But "Should the government tax email?", no.
If consumers decide that per-email fees are a fair price for eliminating spam, then private enterprise can provide it without state meddling. Pay-email poses technical and administrative challenges, so it might not ever really work- but sticking the IRS in there would just strengthen the obstacles.