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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
Actually, it does. In China and Japan, at least.
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
Spammers tailor the stream of bytes to get into other people's computers, bypassing various measures the owners have taken to keep them out. Does this sound like "computer cracking". That's because it is. Did you think that computer cracking is illegal? All together now: That's because it is.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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!
I think many on Slashdot will agree with me that this proposal is, essentially, unimplementable. The SMTP protocol simply isn't designed to interface into some kind of online micropayment transaction system to make everybody pay their tax. That said, I'm very pleased to see a member of Congress acting proactively on the issue of spam (i.e., unsolicited email, not the delicious lunch meat).
.NET enabled heavy iron monsters, guarded by severe-looking men with machine guns, and laser-wielding robots. Every email account in the United States will be routed through these machines, and sophisticated genetic algorithms will filter out any messages containing the words "penis enlargement," "exciting timeshare opportunities," and "URGENTLY SEEKING YOUR AID IN AN EMERGENCY BUSINESS TRANSACTION." Keep in mind, privacy advocates, as an added bonus, this system could spell the end for hated systems like Carnivore (or whatever they're calling it these days) because, with every email server consolidated in a secret underground lab in New Mexico, there's no need to monitor your local ISPs traffic. It's a win-win. As an added bonus, this system could very well stop terrorists in their tracks. Just imagine the look on poor Ahmed's face when DIS (Department of Internet Security) stormtroopers burst through the door of his flat, guns blazing, after intercepting his "Dear Osama, the attacks begin at dawn" email.
/.'ers to write their congressmen immediately, and say, with one clear voice, "URGENTLY SEEKING YOUR LEGISLATIVE ACTION: Please stop Osama from acquiring penis enlargement, such that he may steal our nubile young coeds willing to bare it all at the luxurious timeshare condominium financed with a low, low interest rate!" Think of the children, people.
I guess the problem with Mr. Dayton's approach is, it doesn't go far enough. You can't very well force everyone to change their mail servers over to a system with the transaction processing software in it. On the other hand, the government has got to DO SOMETHING, as no one is interested in lower mortgage or nubile young coeds willing to "bare it all!" for you. Therefore, the only logical option to stop spam (i.e., unsolicited email) is to consolidate the email facilities of the United States. Perhaps we need the creation of a Department of Internet Security.
Imagine, if you will, an underground labyrinth of servers, all secure
Truly, there is no downside to this plan. I urge all
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
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?
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.
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!
(Checks computer specs) Nope, nothing about it being government property or a marketing channel. However, if someone said that skipping commercials is theft, someone will say this. (But I really had to go to the washroom, honest!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Ok, there are already some wingnut posts on this story, so I feel the need to set the record straight:
This is not just a case of RTFA, it's a case of RTFP (post). Fortunately the post quotes Dayton as saying Dayton says a tax is "just one of the tactics that should be considered, but I don't favor it at this time.".
It's just an idea folks. Obviously we all know it isn't workable, but at least these guys are thinking about the issue in general.
There probably isn't a legislative solution, and I think Mark Dayton is open minded enough to reach that conclusion and then say it publicly. Of course, I don't think it would get as much coverage as this story, because here's a Democrat trying to raise taxes! For shame!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
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 |
Do Nigerians pay Taxes in the US?
If not? Will George W. Bush invade Nigeria because of eMail-Terrorism?
NoSuchGuy
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
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.
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.
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.
Like /.! If there were only a miniscule tax on Slashdot posts... (then this one wouldn't be here).
Seriously, how could this ever be implemented? Who's going to track who sends how many emails, and to where? Furthermore, the logical spaces of the Internet don't correspond very well (at this time) to physical spaces in the world. Do you have to pay export taxes if you're emailing someone overseas? Do you have to pay import taxes to receive an overseas email? Will it cost more to email someone "further away" from you?
How would this tax apply to *my* email server?
How do we even define "email"? Would this apply to messages sent to a different port, or a different protocol? If we do, then where do we draw the line?
In the end, taxing one type of Internet communication differently from any other type doesn't make sense. If all that's moving are logical bits, then distinguishing between the types of bits for taxation purposes seems silly. Either tax bandwidth usage, or don't, but don't tax only some.
Now, if there is $$ changing hands, taxation at least makes sense, even if you don't like it. If something other than bits is being moved (whether it's money or some other type of property), then taxation starts to make a lot more sense.
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.
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
California could explore this option too.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
A Minnesotan here, and I like Dayton and all, but he isn't exactly the most compelling public speaker you'll find. I get the feeling when he qualified himself that he isn't dissembling, he just has a nervous habit of qualifying *everything*. ...which is a politician trick, I know...
Anyway, the point is that this is more "Hey, this might be an idea, or whatever, I really don't know," than it is "I have this secret plot I want to enact, but I'll throw you off the trail by claiming I'm unsure about it."
Not japan, to my knowledge. It's a civilized democracy, and has been for quite some time.
Obviously, it would be shitty to pay more for something we already know and love (or you might have email for free, in which case paying anything would stink). But here's what I like about it. They could set it up in some kind of tiered system, kinda like cell phone usage plans, where it's pretty cheap if you stay within your expected usage, but totally unreasonably expensive if you go over. So maybe you pay one penny per email sent during the month, with a cap of 500 emails sent (I'm just throwing that number out there, because it seems like a huge number for an individual). If you go over 500 emails, you pay $1 per email. You could then regulate email traffic and collect taxes at the ISP level, since they're the ones who own and control the smtp servers.
Yes, there would be implementation issues and privacy concerns, problems, etc., but if this were in place I can't help but think it would make a positive difference. And before I get slammed by everyone, I realize there are all kinds of problems with legislating spam behavior in this country. The most obvious of which is the spammer's ability to simply relocate their operation outside the U.S. border where U.S. laws will have a much more difficult time taking effect.
Keep in mind that I'm not trying to invent the solution in this post, so don't take it like I'm defending the silver bullet to the problem of spamming, or go on a crusade to prove why I'm wrong. I just think this is an interesting idea. There are problems with every other spam prevention idea, evidenced by the continued (and growing) presence of spam for the majority of people (ie, not just computer geeks; spam reduction has to work for people like our grandparents and non-nerdy friends, and it will have to be transparent for it to work).
I think the email tax seems like one of the least shitty solutions out there. Anyone else have other, not-so-shitty solutions to spam?
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
For the purposes of this tax what exactly constitutes an email? Is it any communication on port 25? What if I use some other port? Would I get still taxed if I ftp'd a text file? What if the file were compressed. What about message board traffic? What about IRC? What about Instant Messenger? What if I mail someone a floppy with messages on it?
What happens with email from outside of the taxing jurisdiction? Does the receiver pay? (That would be cool. I could just 'drive' across the border and mail bomb people I don't like. POW! right in the checkbook!)
...and then I realised it would kill mailing lists, too.
Then again, it might be made to work if, instead of the government taxing every outgoing mail spool, ISPs charged other ISPs for the privilege of sending mail to their users. That is, when fred@aol.com sends a mail to jim@hotmail.com, AOL has to pay Hotmail 1/10 cent, or however much the "tax" is set at. These charges would be aggregated, so there would be one monthly bill instead of trillions of nano-payments. Your ISP subscription could include, say, 1000 free emails per month, or 12,000 per year.
I would expect that for normal email traffic, the amount flowing in each direction would be about equal. When someone starts spamming, though, their ISP is slapped with large invoices. If the ISP has any sense, they pass those invoices on to the spammer. If the invoices aren't paid, the ISP that sent them refuses any traffic from those IP blocks.
For spam that comes through open relays or proxies, invoice whoever runs the open machine, and let them worry about where it really came from. If they can find the spammer and recover the cost from him, great. If not, they'll have learned a valuable lesson about not leaving an unsecured box on the open Internet.
A scheme that requires all (or many) ISPs to change their behaviour would be difficult to get working, but easier than one that requires all (or many) email users to change. The biggest problem I foresee is that it's notoriously hard to extract money from a spammer. Still, if ISPs who are currently spam-friendly know that selling connectivity to a spammer will cost them a large amount of money, they might be more careful about whom they sign up.
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
"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.
Bugger that. Kill the damn spammer.
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.
So we are using China's government model now...
Seriously, why is it that the government's solution is always to tax? Wasn't this country founded by people who were against that principle.
..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 could not afford an extra $500/mo or $6000 per year just for the right to send out email notices to users.
Would the law apply overseas? I could see lots of people abandoning MSN, Hotmail, & Yahoo mail to use overseas mail services. Would they be able to tax you if you went to the off shore mail server and sent from your account there? What's to keep a spammer from doing the same thing?
I got my first e-mail account while overseas. It's still my primary account. The ISP is a small one so it isn't the target of dictionary attacks like the US nationwide ISP's. After 8 years of use, it seldom gets more than 3 SPAM's per week. It's the main reason I keep it.
I think one of the things that is overlooked in reducing the success of dictionary attacks is what mega ISP's can do. They need to divide up their mail servers so each would have no more than say about 5000 mailboxes. It would make the addresses a little longer maybe. Instead of having an address such as technician126@msn.com, I would have an address like technician@mail3275.msn.com. A Mega ISP is a sitting duck for a dictionary attack. A dictionary attack on a small domain could easly be detected and rejected. As an example, more than 5 invalid emails from one TCP address in a day would block the sender for like a week. Attacks like bob@ bob1@ bob2@ bob3@... would quickly blacklist the sender for all of the ISP's inboxes, not just the server being attacked (@mail3275.msn.com would also block @mail****.msn.com). The inboxes would be protected by a virtual minefield. The spam failure rate would be high and the valid mail would not be impeded as a valid address is already known to the sender.
(disclaimer not my real addresses. I'm a member of a small ISP, not a national)
The truth shall set you free!
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.
Not at all; America (I'm assuming thats what you mean by "this country") was founded on the principles of Taxation with Representation. Basically, all the colonies wanted was a say in the British legislature, and let the crown know this several times. Of course, the point could be made that we don't really have much in the way of representation as it is...
In order to determine the solution to the SPAM problem you have to get into some pretty hairy mathematics. Fortunately, I am presently unemployed and willing to spend some time working on this.
When you talk about email, you are really talking about sending bytes of information, but a perfectly clear email can be sent in relatively few bytes, perhaps a Kilobyte. So let m be a kilobyte's worth of email. m is a good descripter because it stands for mail.
Now sending mail through the internet requires processor effort. Lets choose E for this to stand for the effort. E would then be the effort required to push m through an email processor on the internet in a second.
There is only so much that the internet can do sending emails, eventually with enough spammers, the internet will get bogged down, certainly there will be bottlenecks here and there. Of course the theoretical limitation is the speed of electrons somewhat approaching a maximum of kilobytes of mail per second per second that we can call c.
It can be shown that mail messages can be related to m through the quantity c using the following formula.
E=mc^2
Aha!!!
The solution is obvious... NUKE THE SPAMMERS.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
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.
Actually, it does. In China and Japan, at least.
That's 100% backwards. Japan doesn't try to reduce childbirth, and has no worries about overpopulation. It's got a birthrate of much less than 2 kids per family, and the government is terrified. (They're fearful that the future won't have enough citizens to tax- a problem the US might face in the 2ks as well).
That low rate is apparently the natural consequence of wealthy people in constricted space; nobody wants their kids to live on smaller lots than they do, so situations where children would outnumber parents are avoided. They'd hate to divide an inheritance 3+ ways. (And even if most families desire 2 kids, miscellaneous factors lead to them failing to achieve that goal, giving an overall rate of 1.85 kids or so)
The government has been working on many projects to encourage families to reproduce more. Some of these have approached the form of negative-taxes, where the taxes on "parasite singles" go to childcare for breeders.
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!
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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
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.
Here's why that won't happen. I don't know what Bayesian filter is. Sounds like something from Star Trek to me. If I don't know what it is, how is some 55+ yr old congressman who can't operate his VCR expected to understand it?
People who sufficiently understand the technology are a miniscule minority that dedicate much of their lives to it. They fail to realize the rest of us are thrilled if we can get something to work. The knowledgable folks don't get involved with politics, leaving the business of setting policy to crusty old Politicos who know nothing about it and don't have the time needed to learn such intracies.
The only way to get realistic solutions is to:
A: make technology simpler and more accesible so that you don't have to be a geek to understand. Not going to happen. It just keeps getting more innaccesible all the time, demanding more and more effort to keep up.
B: Elect people who have first hand experience. Nevermind the completely broken poltical system, these folks are too busy downloading copies of yet-to-be-released movies anyway.
So we're stuck with these kinds of half-assed solutions. Sometimes that's better than nothing. Sometimes (RIAA)it's much worse than nothing. Even if this solution reduces my Spam by one e-mail a day, I'm probably in favour.
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.
and take government control out of the picture. I agree wholeheartedly that email should never become a revenue source for any government or organization.
If you want to make micropayments the vehicle to stem the tide of spam, go ahead, but let the recipient receive the payment.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
I can only get a dial-up account. I can't get a cable modem or DSL in this area. That's been true in the four places I've lived, all in Dallas, over the past 7-8 years.
I currently receive around 400 spams a day. In order to run a bayesian filter, I would have to download all of those messages first, then let the filter sort through them, before I could look at my legitimate mail. That's not a good solution.
In theory, a bayesian filter can run on the server. I'm told that there are some that do that. But then you lose the ability to interact with the program, telling it "This was spam you let through" and "this was legitimate mail which you didn't deliver". The ones currently available let you do those things via a website. Sure, that's what I want to do, go to a website to figure out where my legitimate mail is at. Sorry, I'm just not willing to waste that much time.
Here's an idea that has been mentioned before, but merits a mention here. It's not clear how we would "get there from here," but it's food for thought.
Imagine an e-mail system in which the sender of an e-mail would have to pay the recipient a fee specified by the recipient. The e-mail simply would not show up in the recipient's inbox unless the fee is paid.
You would be able to provide "keys" to regular correspondents, legitimate mailing lists, etc., that would allow them to reach your inbox without paying a fee. The keys would be revokable, in case they are abused or fall into the wrong hands.
It would be an expected courtesy, but not enforced, that legitimate e-mail that pays a fee would have the fee refunded once the recipient recognizes the mail as legitimate.
Now, if you're actively seeking e-mails from unknown senders -- for example, if you advertise a product or service and tell people to e-mail you for more information -- then you probably wouldn't charge a fee to reach your inbox. If you're a more typical user, you would set a small fee, probably just a few cents, so as not to deter legitimate mail.
A spammer, assuming he doesn't have keys to millions of inboxes, would need to pay tens of thousands of dollars in order to reach them all, assuming they each require a payment of a few cents.
This would not only deter spam but also compensate its victims. However, it would have little effect on legitimate e-mail.