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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
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?
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!
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
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 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
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
Bugger that. Kill the damn spammer.
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!?"
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!
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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.