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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."
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?
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.
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?