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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."
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.
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Clearly it should go to a once-a-year ice cream party for the whole Internet.
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
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?
Bugger that. Kill the damn spammer.