Slashdot Mirror
EU Considers Taxing SMS Messages, Email
An anonymous reader writes to mention a Reuters article about a proposed EU tax on email and phone messages. From the article: "In Italy, the concept of a tax on texting was floated in the past, as a way to help offset the country's huge deficit, although it was flatly rejected by the outgoing government. But Lamassoure argues that with billions of emails and texts sent around the world, it's a novel and simple way to raise funds from new technology. 'Exchanges between countries have ballooned, so everyone would understand that the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU,' he said."
Is it going to be the sender or receiver who pays the tax?
... although how much spams comes from the EU is doubtful.
If it's the sender, then this might would be a good way to reduce spam originating from the EU.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
How will they tax the average Joe who got his PC hax0red and is being used a zombie for SPAM?
;)
Will be interesting to see them receive a 5 million Euro bill though!
Tax breathing, man that would be a great way for cash strapped governments to raise some extra funds. Makes about as much sense as taxing texting...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I, for one, welcome our new taxing overlords....
Oh, who am I kidding, no I don't.
Let's tax the hell out of hard working citizens!
..explain how the EU has "engendered" any benefits to me in the field of E-Mail and SMS? Actually it would be great if you could explain to me how the EU has engendered any net benefits to me at all.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
On the bright side, this would cut down on all the SMS spam that's sent that we all have to pay for receiving. On the minus side, it could put a major dent in the usage of SMS. Though, in Europe, I think it's used quite a bit -- for some reason, it's been a bit slower to catch on in the US.
It won't happen, this is just fodder. Plenty of things get "investigated" at the European Parliament. All it really tells us is that some representatives don't really understand things very well -- but we knew that anyway. Is it just me or is this just a pointless opportunity for some misdirected, ill-informed, pro-American, anti-European slashdot reader commentary?
Money growing on Trees!
Lets just hope our populous is ignorant enough to swallow it and realize we're actually levying an excessive tax on something that has ZERO cost to the government in the first place.
But hey, money's money right? I should bring this idea up in the Canadian Parliament, lets get them to impose a tax on every page view on the internet. Not only will we be out of debt in no time, we'll be rich Rich RICH!!!
Oh the fallacies and deceit sitting on a pile of incompetence and idiocy!
No Comment.
Let me be the first to say: this is stupid, it can't work and - ultimately - it will be rejected.
Real life is overrated.
Well, I guess I'll be seeing you in Norway then.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Stop spending so much.
When the economy slows down, fire some publicans. When the economy grows, fire more publicans so it can grow more. Start downsizing today, and then downsize tomorrow. Keep downsizing until you've downsized to the point of no more complaints for more money or overstretched budget.
I think there should be a law that says the minute that a government employee complains about his pay or his budget, he gets fired. Roll the money to someone else. When they complain, fire them and keep rolling it over and refunding it to the taxpayers.
I can't believe they want to tax communications more. To me, I believe that the Right to Expression is universal (inherent/God-given/natural), and that taxing expression in any way is regulating a right that can't be regulated.
Under the aegis of "..., This is peanuts, but given the billions of transactions every day, this could still raise an immense income," he said....,
So, government when faced with a need for money (how often does that happen?) sees that billions of e-mails and text messages are being sent and infers they can and should extract a tiny morsel of blood from their constituents, concluding, "it's only a tiny bit". This is insane.
Better served and directed would be transparency by the government: "This is how much money we need, and this is what it will cost each taxpayer..." At least then the people get a more honest appraisal of what government is doing.
Foisting micro-taxes and micro-debits is also an additional unnecessary burden upon the billing mechanism for an already too complex system of charges.
If this were proposed in the United States, it would be almost singularly enough of a reason to cast my vote against any representative who supported such a scheme.
"everyone would understand that the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU,' he said."
So what if a citizen decides to send their e-mail to europle via a US server? Would that be chargable? And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure we had overseas communication before the EU existed.
One of the main reasons that e-mail is so popular is that it -isn't- taxed by the government, unlike just about every form of communication in Europe.
This makes no sense whatsoever. Taxing email makes a little sense if they're providing infrastructure, but they probably aren't. Taking SMS makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE however, because the cellphone companies provided 100% of the infrastructure except where they tie into the phone system.
I don't know if european phone system wiring was typically consumer-subsidized as it was here in the USA, but if it was, then the cellphone companies are probably already paying taxes in their bills for trunks, or whatever kind of connections they're using, and as such no additional tax should be levied.
Taxing SMS would be like taxing breathing - the EU has nothing to do with providing either one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Whilst I can see how an SMS tax would easily be passed onto customers, I can't see how an email tax is feasable, since if they tax ISPs, people can simply use a foreign ISP, and it would be a logistical nightmare to tax individuals for it - it's not like you have to stick a stamp on them or anything!
Oh - and summary? The title says "EU" but the summary says "Italy". There's a slight difference between these two (I didn't RTFA but it really isn't clear FTFS).
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
As a SCUBA diver, my air is already being taxed (VAT on the costs of filling a cylinder)...
:)
Nothing new there
Gtnx
Marcel
Let's think of something that lots of people do, then say we're going to tax it! Without even considering any of the details on how to apply the tax to the correct person or organization, how to collect that tax, or how to punish those who avoid the tax! Woohoo! Let's run around waving our arms like we're doing something!
Anyone with a whit of sense has to know that under the current technology there is no way to tax email. If you want to tax the sender, there would have to be a way to absolutely identify the sender of the email, which there's not. If you're going to tax the recipient, then you need to provide recipients a way to decline to receive email that they don't want to pay taxes on (spam), which means you have to have a way to absolutely identify the sender of the email, and there's still not a way to do that.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
1.) Can I be on your list?*free*
2.) No, go away.*free*
3.) Aww, you sure?* $5
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
This sounds like a pretty terrible idea. Taxing something means that there will be less use, so less potential tax over time. If they want to increase tax revenues from technology use, they should consider reducing taxes for those companies that promote the market-use of that technology. It is probable that SMS, Email, and other forms of messaging bring income to those companies that utilize them both by reducing their internal costs and by giving consumers more effective ways of communicating with each other (and the companies themselves.) More income --even at a reduce tax percentage-- means much larger revenues.
The US tax revenues are higher than they have ever been (by over 25% when adjusted for inflation) despite federal tax decreases for almost all industries and tax brackets.
Now the EU is moving in on our American urban legends!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
it'd be more forward moving to just accept that economy is changing due to computing and allow an economic system to develope on this reduced cost of communication and digital distribution. and since its world wide communication you won't need to deal with how one country is to level taxes on those not of that country?
Instead of taxing emails and text messages, and specifying how straight bananas must be before they can legally be called "bananas", maybe the EU should consider cutting down some of its ridiculous bureaucracy. That would be a surefire way of saving money! Damn, that sounds really Eurosceptic; maybe it's the fact that this is a stupid scheme that smacks of picking on a soft target to make some easy cash. I'm sure consumers already pay over the odds for electronic communications, and by adding yet more expense (for something as intangible as an email no less) it seems the EU wants to fall behind the rest of the world...
I think I'm all in favour of this tax!
Since I don't know anyone in the EU I never phone there or send emails anyways. Even if I do the number will be low.
However Capone was tossed in Jail for Tax Evasion so passing a law that taxes those who send emails will hit exactly that part of the spammer world that needs to be hit - and hard!
If it happens to hit some innocent folks who set up open mail gateways, or otherwise connect (willing) unsecured hosts to high speed lines, then I guess this is reasonable collateral damage especially considering the number of evangellical people who are trumpeting solutions and willing to offer free assistance right up to the point of developing (for free) the applications which are far more secure; all the way through to installing same for free and training people in how to use them.
Maybe this is a silver lining!
Propably all europeans already pay value added tax (vat) from SMSes and internet connections. In Finland that's 22% of your phone bill or internet bill.
If the governments want to collect money, they can always tax the receiver. They don't care that you get spammed, they get their money anyway. Take the UK television tax. You have to pay the BBC even if you don't watch them ever ! http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/international/bbc.htm l
Q: What will be the first Arab country to get the bomb?
A: France.
Will the tax apply to internal emails or reminders I email myself? Who monitors our mailservers and how? How about if we hack email to function over https? On a scale of 1 to 10, how clueless would somebody have to be to think this is workable?
SMS already costs me far too much, they should be subsidising it instead!
How would they tax email anyway? Ask my ISP? I don't even use the email account my ISP provided. Are they going to subpoena Gmail and Hotmail to find out how many emails I've sent? It's completely rediculous.
Why not tax something more tangible like air instead?
Billions of people move their legs, billions of people masturbate.
Let's tax masturbation, maybe that will work better than this...
You can't handle the truth.
Novel?
There's this new thing. Everyone's using it. I know, let's tax it!
Yeah. Sure. Novel.
This space intentionally left blank
It would be a double tax. SMSers already pay tax on their phone service via VAT in every single bill or top up card.
I am in favour of taxes such as VAT, which impose a flat rate on all goods and services where it would be too complex and cumbersome to evaluate the cost to the government of each individual services. I'm only in favour of additional, specific, taxes when it can be shown that the good or service does actually cost the government more money. Best example is alcohol. Prime target for excise duty.
I'm not in favour of taxes designed solely and completely as an excuse to obtain more public funds. If they really wanted more money, they'd introduce a third tax band.
May the Maths Be with you!
I think this might be a great opportunity for all of the American Republican consultants to set up shop over in the EU. A heavy dosage of tax cuts and a touch of religious mania should do miracles for the EU economy. Still have to figure out what to do with all the Democratic tax and spenders running wild in their absence. It's a zero sum game no matter how you cut it. :(
What are they going to do, build up some of those closets that the NSA reportedly has in major US datacenters to tap into all net traffic?
Seriously though, how could you possibly track e-mail without the help of virtually every domain owner? How do you deal with webmail services? If I send an e-mail from a gmail account to a yahoo account then yes it's going over port 25 so it could theoretically be tracked by monitoring systems. But if you send a webmail from one gmail account to another or from one yahoo account to another then the only way you'd know about it is if Google, Yahoo, etc. starts tracking and accounting for all their e-mails.
And then there's the whole issue of spam. Spammers have control of tons of virus/trojan infected PC's that they regularly use to send out their spew. Are end users responsible for paying the taxes on spam sent unknowingly from their PC's? I could see individuals suing the government for knowing about infected PC's and doing nothing about it since those machines are now a source of tax revenue.
And what about personal domains, smaller companies, etc? Unless you force each and every domain owner worldwide to turn over mail logs you'd end up with huge discrepencies in the application of the taxes. Although I don't live in Europe I do own a few of my own domains and run my own mail server. It's used mostly for family accounts. If I lived in the EU then would I be required to keep accounting information and turn it over to the tax authorities? Could I charge them for the time involved in setting this up and regularly turning the logs over to them?
There are exactly 2 reasons why email and SMS are very popular: they are convenient and cheap (with email being free). Take away one of the 2 (or in the worst case, both) and people will move on to something else.
The suggestion has been suggested by the French centre-right wing member of parliament Alain Lamassoure. The suggested tax would be 0.00001 cent (eurocent) for an email, and an incredible 1.5 cent for an sms! While the email tax seems reasonable given that we accept the premise of the tax, the sms tax is outright ridiculous. In Denmark that amounts to more than 50% of the current price of an sms!
Bite my shiny TLS-protected port-you-don't-know ass.
The numbers just don't add up: "a 0.00001 cent levy on every email sent" translates to 1e-7 EUR per message (and probably per hop). Assuming that there are 1 million million message-hops per day (1 US trillion, way over the top IMHO), this translates to just 100,000 EUR per day, or 36.5 million EUR per year. Obviously, this doesn't even cover the cost of the required accounting infrastructure.
Guess this will be good for linux (atleast for a short time)
:-)
If they are going to tax the sender - all the m/c which are hacked to send SPAMs would be first ones to get affected adversely.
This will cause the average joe to wake up to the frailities of Windows... Nothing like a bill to get a persons attention.
Thus many more people will go to more secure systems - and Linux since it currently has the name of being a secure system, would benefit.
But once many people move to Linux, the hacking would start in Linux then...
Then who knows - Minix might be king
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
I heard that they will soon charge a Tax for each toilet flush!!! If it is yellow, let it mellow!!
Just Kidding!
Seriously though, what is next?
They must have gotten that email forward finally. I got it like 7 years ago.
nothing
Sender- 1 cent (Euro, Dollar, whatever)
I've thought this was a good idea for a long time. Charge it at the net connection to companies or individuals. Privately, I send ~100 emails a month, professionally, ~200 on a busy month. Most of the professional ones are through Intranet, and $1.00 a month isn't going to put me in the hole.
Spammers, on the other hand, try sending in the hundreds of thousands to tens of millions range; $10,000 per batch pretty quickly adds up. Uh-oh, Granny caught a virus, and her PC is a zombie. First, her ISP probably already cut her off, second, make it easy to appeal. Prove (by being an old granny ) your PC is a zombie, the fine is lowered to $100. Teach her her lesson about not installing her virus definitions.
As with any law or tax, it needs to be implemented right, but I would love to see this, especially opposed to a tiered internet (different groups, I know, but same basic comcepts).
I know there are few people who use SMS here in the US, but it's complicated and cost extra. I know my phone has a pile of features like text messages and that vcast thing, but it's just too hard to use with those tiny little cell phone keys with three+ letters to a key. (it took me a week to figure out how to put my mp3s on the damn player mode!) It's just easier to call and keep it short.
Dude! Movies! Xmen. 5. Dennys? cool.
-Buddy of DoQ
... remove AOL, China and South Korea from the net.
So, for every law written, there's a tax: including laws written to obolish the law tax...which then puts the law in force again?
Zero cost? Do you have any idea how much all those sms thumbs costs the society in medical bills and incapicitated workers each year?
But this time, instead of tea, we'll be dumping spam.
My guess-translation of this chap's ravings are that...
...hence all your texts and emails are belong to us. or rather eu.
/.ers a chance to see that, though Federal Goverment is young in the EU it's doing its best to grow into something far more warped than the Feds in the US.
* the EU set the spec for GSM phones, hence texting, hence SMS?
* the EU funded CERN, hence Berners-Lee, hence the web, hence e-mail?
I know this is crazy stuff, don't worry (God bless DARPAnet etc). But why stop with internal taxation within the EU? The Roman Empire invented Latin script, which many foreign countries are using. So after this, expect royalty charges on that too. And don't even get me started on what the EU is going to charge the USA for the licence to use the English language...
Absurd, obviously, but gives American
They can tax SMS, this is because mobile operators are few, offer limited services and SMS traffic is easy to follow and always passes through their central.
But i wanna see them try taxing e-mail. E-mail is basically a piece of electronic information in a huge sea of information on the Internet, travels point to point and isn't guaranteed to pass through some "registration" server at EU, so basically it's undetectable from one central place.
An e-mail can happen at any point at any time, and the source can also easily be fake.
Politicians apparently believe that law means something they voted and it happens. But it should be possible to happen in first place, and taxing e-mail isn't one of those.
... not created just because money existed somewhere. It used to be, for the most part, that something was taxed because it incurred costs on the gov't. However, now it seems that anytime a politician sees money somewhere, we have to figure out a way to tax it.
The Italy scenario has started to be a standard (I know it's the same way in the state of Oregon). When the legislature cannot budget properly, they look for money elsewhere; anywhere. If voters let this happen, we reward financial irresponsibility instead of telling them to get it right next time.
Taxing emails and text messages is great idea, but hey, there is even better opportunity to raise money for goverment. Lets tax SEX!!! Think about it, just in EU tens of millions of people are having sex everyday, some even have sex multiple times in a day! And you know there is moral justification for it, it costs society real money when people have sex, the hospitals are crowded with women giving birth, people being sick because sexually transmitted diseases, and lot's of other! Sex costs money! It would be fair, if people having sex would pay to society the costs of having sex!
And also it should be noted, that ability to have sex isn't equal with everybody, that's not fair! People who have more sex should be taxed progressively to make society fair and people more equal with each other!
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
My companys has an internal email system. Would they tax every message sent inside the network. what about employees who reside in europe but email the home office in America. And what keeps people from just getting a tax free email domain address? Instead of taxing emails, just tax traffic at the router level.
Read his stylish flash forum, if you speak French (I don't). His username is Lamassoure.
Boy am I glad I don't live in the USA. First the DMCA, now this. Their government is the worst in the world! This sort of thing would never happen here in progressive Europe. Europe is so much better than the US.
Oh, wait.
Crap!
As others have stated, this is just stupid. How could you possibly set up a system to monitor all this traffic. Wait... i think the NSA could show them how... Seriously though, even here in the US many states expect you to report your internet purchases and pay tax on the items from out of state... um... its too bad i've *NEVER* purchased anything off the web.... ;)
1. SMS, use a differnt message center number that is not monitored by EU (though putting an international message number might be costly, so email2sms might be a good choice) 2. EMAIL, how on earth are they going to tax this, people can setup their own smtp transport use a international smtp server, if they try to use the receipent records to tax the sender then it maybe an issue, that case people will start using more IM and skpye and then the EU will want to tax your IM :-)
http://iesucks.org
I now pay 10 cents per SMS. At 21% TVA, that is 2.1 cents. 1.5 cent would mean a reduction in cost for me.
Oh you mean ON TOP of what I already pay?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Though I absolutely agree with you that this is un-enforceable, I think the problem is not with identifying who pays. It is easy - you tax the carrier of the e-mail, and the rest takes care of itself - the carrier knows who to charge.
But you can not really tax e-mail. People (i.e. internet providers, and through them people) will move to a different port, different protocol, icu, secret blogs, hidden web pages whatever. In the end you'd have to tax bytes sent on the net.
"Free healthcare, free education"
Repeat after me,
"IT IS NOT FREE, IT IS PAID FOR BY TAXES"
Now, proceed to make a half-assed attempt to justify your previous statement and how it is completely contradicted by reality.
Your PC gets zombified, and suddenly you are hit with a tax bill for 3 billion emails.
Nice try, Houdini.
can't see how they can tax my emails that go through my own server, using TLS or SSL, sometimes i even check them over SSH.
and even webmail would be hard to pull out of standard web traffic.
#include <sig.h>
This is why we don't want Europe controlling the internet.
A tax is not 'money for the hell of it.'
A tax is 'money for a service or security provided.'
Bastard politicians like this seem to have not gotten the memo.
Technically, postage, a license (for nearly anything), a toll, a goverment-mandated surcharge of any sort, are all forms of tax, and in many cases, you get something back, even if it is in the form of regulation that (theoretically) makes it safer for you to conduct business. It boggles the mind that politicians can become aware of a transaction of any sort and view it as a revenue stream, while providing NOTHING in return.
In addition, it's delivered on top of a (telco) protocol that's presumably taxed out the yingyang. What if I invent a protocol that makes text messages smaller, and therefore subject to less tax? Will they tax my protocol within a protocol as well?
What Italy really needs to do is to lower the barriers for small business and service-oriented entrepreneurial startups. Right now, it's such a mess of regulations that no one can start one...or they'll do so under the table, thereby eliminating the possibility of additional revenue streams for the government. The $billions in wealth created in the last decade in the US and UK (among others) was created mostly in Services, while Italy has been building a protectionist barrier around their factories.
It's time for them to wake up and ask an economist for advice, not a tax collector.
Maybe the terrorists and misantrophs are right?
What they don't appear to understand is that by levying a tax on a popular service, they are essentially raising its price. This means that the demand for this service will likely decrease because it is already more or less priced as high as it can be without lowering demand. Way to stifle the industry!
Increased federalisation and progress towards a super-state has just been rejected by referenda many pro-europe countries, so it's unlikely to be getting raising taxes any time soon.
UK Laptops
I for one (and probably the only one) think this is a great idea. For starters, if I were to only get e-mails that the sender was willing to pay a cent for, my inbox would be a much better place. Taxes have to come from somewhere, and I don't see that communications is that much worse than the alternatives.
The general sentiment in this forum appears to be that taxes are evil, but around here the more they cut taxes the more things fall apart. We used to have a pretty nice city - now we can't afford any of the things that made it nice.
Also, reading on
STOP WASTING OTHER PEOPLES MONEY ON STUPID SHIT ASSHOLES!
My fucking god thats completely brain damaged. our healthcare system is shit, it costs us so much that we are godzillions over budget, so lets text 15 year old girls who send text messages to their friends so bumfuck worthlessshit who has not worked in 50 years due to superlazyitis can have breast implants.
Liberal stupity kills me.
Both E-Mail and SMS could be easily replicated... Forum communities often have thier own messaging systems, and it wouldn't be hard to create something like that for the general public.
I regret spilling a glass of ginger ale on an achritect!
O, Slashdot! Please surprise me with the article about new taxes for average Joes without a tag "stupid".
Average MAP kinase.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
1. Find a proxie server
2. log into gmail
3. send email out
4. pay no taxes
Can't that be done? You're not going through a pop server from your ISP, in theory the ISP just sees you going to a proxy server. Right? Or is there much more to this than that?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
tax spam assholes! you can make millions! why not put a tax on internet usage, like for every byte in and out they can collect tax. stupid mofos.
If EU starts taxing e-mails, people from EU will start using mail servers outside EU a little bit more. I don't believe this is possible at all. Maybe charging local ISPs, but still sounds crazy to me.
Pixel image editor - http://www.kanzelsberger.com
SMS messages, fine. Cellular carriers can fork over the tax and pass it on to consumers. Mobile carriers are equipped to handle taxes. They are all centralized.
How on earth do you tax email? If it were easy to do, I'm sure our own government would be doing it. Many email accounts are anonymous and free providers don't make THAT much money from ad revenues.
Will Italy require users running Sendmail at home to pay taxes? What about corporate users? This plan reaks of failure because it sounds like it was written by people that don't understand the technology that they want to tax. Sending email to grandma does not necessarily make you an expert.
Soooo... The EU invented email and text messaging?
1) If the sender spoofs the MAC and IP then your senders' charge will fall on innocent victim.
2) If someone does this and sends you a million emails, you won't be happy to pay to receivershp fee on all of them, just in order to extract some precious few emails from the flood.
In the real world, it doesn't matter whether this is SMS, email, radio or good old fashioned sound communication. All can be spoofed by people who don't wish to be traced. The blowback from their actions will inevitably be paid for by law abiding citizens.
It reminds me of an advert that's running here in the UK, which claims that "if you are using a pirated digital set-top box, your signal can and will be blocked, and you will be fined". They might as well have said "downloading mp3s WILL give you herpes" or some other similar scaremongering.
News flash!!! A digital radio signal is just that: a RADIO SIGNAL! So what are they going to do? Put up a faraday cages over all the pirated (spoofed) digital set-top boxes? Yet another public display of ineptitude that casts the people in charge in an unfavourable light and makes me really, really weep when contemplating the future of humanity.
In the event of my death, I wish to donate my Karma.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3514.html
I mean, come'n if they would be able to audit all e-mail traffic and tax appropriately, this should be a breeze...
The "free" services you mentioned are the reason why your taxes are so darned high, your economies are stagnant, and your unemployment rate constantly flirts with 10%. By the way, how do you enjoy paying for all of those "free" services for Muslim immigrants who refuse to assimilate? How is that working out for you?
"Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem."
-Ronald Reagan
Let's tax any conversation !
It has many advantages:
- huge money to politics coffers
- people begin less talk - less speaking spam
- it is needed to monitor people's speach - just to prevent tax evasion, of course - but it decreases the opposion to ruling party too !
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
1. Convert Italian govt computers to SPAM zombies.
2. Govt Computers send tons of SPAM all over the web.
3. Italian govt bills itself for all of the sent eMails.
4. Mark those bills as income.
5. ???
6. Profit?
What, me Tweet?
the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU
If we're talking about e-mail and sms here, then this is nothing more than plain smelly bullshit. First, for most countries it was not the EU who built or paid for the network infrastructure. Second, it's not the EU who provides sms services or mobile network infrastructure, it's the cell companies, which pay their own share of taxes already (how much where or why is not the question here). Maybe we all should pay huge amounts of you-name-it taxes to Italy since romans built quite a lot all around Europe. Or for the greeks, or...
Stupid politicians should just die a slow and painful death in dark cells.
Anyway, geeks are not geeks for no reason: numberless aletrnatives for smtp-based text messaging could be thought out and implemented over anon onion-like networks and p2p. Of course these solutions would all be illegal, so no company could provide services based on them, and nobody could legally provide proxies and servers hosting such services. That means most of internet messaging would be tossed underground.
No sane mind would really want that. Oh wait, we're talking about politicians here.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Is it even feasible to attach a CC# or Checking Account# to some 13 year old kid's @yahoo email? I cant see the EU having the technical prowess to pull something like that off.
How 'bout fora? Should this posting be taxed? Don't I already pay VAT on the ADSL connection I use?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
How? How would one tax email and SMS?
.it addresses?
Also: What does this offset?
I run my own mail server on the net which I used for email for friends and family. About 85 people have accounts. How the hell would they tax email sent from my machine to the EU, or
They really need to tax the connection to the internet, not the message. Better yet only tax spam. All and all taxes are a tool to cuase people to avoid someting. If something it popular, tax it, and it becomes a little less popular. I'm just not happy about the idea of someone following me around, watching everything I do, and then asking for pennies when I do it. Imagine taking a piss at home and then getting a knock on the door from the government piss tax collector. "But Mr Piss Tax Collector Sir, why did you not just add a high tax to my water bill?" "The tax only covers pissing, and we wanted to be fair."
I'm not a pro-stupid-little-tax type. In Florida I pay $36 bucks a year becuase my rental property has a fridge, stove, and A/C. Since they send the bill to the wrong address they always send someone buy to collect the $36 each year. He said he gets paid $25/hr and drives 45min to collect the tax in a government car that gets about 25mph to the gallon. They lose about $20-25 buck each time they collect their taxes. Maybe they don't want to appear soft on people who provide renters with appliences or something. In any case tuny stupid taxes seem, not only dumb, but often moronic.
I could be wrong, and if I am I hope to change my mind.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
it's a novel and simple way to raise funds from new technology.
Simple? They must be smoking some good stuff over there.
How is this possibly simple? Use taxes do nothing but unnaturally constrain a particular use at the expense of the overall economy. Use taxes unnaturally constrain economic activity just so that polticians can take more of people's time and money without the politicians having to be the ones that are seen to take it out of your pocket. Simply cowardly politicians wanting a bigger slice of everyone's pie, but not wanting people to notice. Just raise the income tax... or god forbid... don't let politicians spend so much money on prostitutes, either being prostitutes or hiring them.
First of all: This proposal has nothing to do with stopping spam.
(For the deaf among us, I repeat: NOTHING)
I don't wanna pay taxes for spam I recieve from US, China or whatever country.
If this was the case, I would forward all my spam to mr. Lamassoure. I hope a few 1000.000.000 fellow EU citizens will follow this example.
At the end of the month, Mr. Lamassoure will have to look for a extra job to pay his spam taxes.
Actualy, there should be a fat overrated tax for propossing stupid laws.
You know these guy gets a fat overrated paycheck from taxes payed by EU citizens?
This proposal is a stupid one, created by someone who doesn't understand one jota about internet.
The protocol smtp can be tunneled into other protocols to avoid taxes.
Actually the proposal itself is a flamebait.
It realy pisses me off
After all, in the US, some elected officials representing "the people" voted for personal income tax...
and lived to tell about it.
All people breath, so let's tax breathing! 0.1 cent per breath ... That should do the trick ...
Now we just have to implant them a breathcounting chip, with RFID of course, so we can bill them properly.
Nah, skip the RFID part, otherwise we have to do manual readouts, put some satelite communication in it, so it just sends the count over to our computer network. And add a GPS funtion while we're at it. Sounds fun.
Can't be done? They could just talk to the NSA and AT&T! I'm sure the US would gladly help count all their email as long as they can read it too.
That would force US intelligence agencies to have to process zillions of spams every day. Wouldn't that amount to DDoS'ing?
Wait a minute, if they're already reading email (and you have to think they are), aren't they already reading zillions of spams a day? They must be employing some kind of Roswell-based spam filtering. Maybe the terrorists could get smart and start sending their messages via spam!
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
"Exchanges between countries have ballooned, so everyone would understand that the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU"
So, the EU is responsible for the success of text messaging and email?
And I thought Al Gore was the one to thank...
Last I checked you paid for sending SMS text messages. And for internet service. And those are both taxed by a general sales tax (every EU memberstate is in fact required to have a general sales tax, though sales tax hits poor people the most, as it's unrelated to your income or whether you even make a living wage).
And apart from a very few exceptions (environmental 'levies' and 'fees' etc.) there is a ban on double taxation.
So, no. Next.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I somehow have trouble accepting the validity of the concept of reasonable collateral damage. I think of collateral damage as something that can't be helped.
Time for the next revision.
"Don't spend more than what you bring in. Try to put something away for the rainy days."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
If this passes, I will protest by going back to the postal svc. I am against the taxation of anything internet. If enough people hold their email and go back to the old way of doing business for awhile, they (the powers that be) will see that there is no money in in trying to enforce a tax on a service that no one is using, they will leave us alone and tax someone else..like the rich! ya! right.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=publican
(Doorbell Rings)
(Door opens)
Occupant: Yes?
EU Minister: 'Mornin', Sir. I'm from the European union. I was wondering if I could trouble you to empty out your pockets, please.
Occupant: Oh, I haven't much in my pockets. Here, see? One used Kleenex, two old theater stubs, and one new condum. Oh, sorry, that's a used one. Nevermind.
Minister: Do you have any pocket lint, sir?
Occupant: Yes, I believe so, why?
Minister: Well, you see, sir, we're instituting a new tax on pocket lint. When you consider all the people walking around with lint in their pockets, you'll see what a marvelous opportunity it is to fund important projects.
Occupant: Such as?
Minister: Why, my well-earned vacations to the south of France, for example. You have no idea how many long hours I spend every day trying to find ways to spend the taxpayers' money. Why, the challenge is positively inhuman some days!
Occupant: I can certainly sympathize, sir. Is that tax per pocket, or does it cover the entire outfit.
Minister: We thought we'd start out with the whole outfit, and if it doesn't work out, or the Union decides on a really big project, like putting a man on Pluto or something, we can always expand the tax to a per pocket.
Occupant (handing over money): here you go.
Minister (pocketing money): Thank you for your co-operation, sir. Rest assured that not only have you performed your civic duty, but you are helping to make the world a safer, lint-free place.
Occupant: Do you want to keep the lint?
Minister: Oh, that's not necessary sir. Just recycle it. Give it to your wife, and someone will be by tomorrow to estimate her tax. Good day to you.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Better to charge the masses peanuts than reign in their own expences.
I know, an old complaint.
My old personal contract is roughly between 9 and 15p per minute when roaming, depending on country/time/etc and optionally calling international at the same time. (for example, UK Sim, calling Sweden -> Finland ).
I've had the account for about 6.5 years now, and you can't sign up to it anymore, and it was basically the key reason for getting it.
Even most business tariffs are pretty crap. 300-500 quid a month on the work phone was about average if we were out the country on just business calls/gprs. Some people I know have gone well over a grand.
Man those Italians have no clue what they are getting into. First off in order to tax people doesnt the government actually have to invest something in this taxable asset first? Like roads, governments can charge tolls because those tolls go to the maintenence of the road on which the toll is charged. Even things like an additional environmental tax on electronics go to fund the program that recycles the electronics. What the hell does any government on this planet do to fund the sending of emails and text messages? They might as well be saying "Ok we are now going to tax you per Google search", the government has nothing to do with Google, they do nothing to fund the people's access to Google, and the money is not being re-invested to help people search Google better. The money is being "invested" to alleviate the government's piss poor spending and planning practices.
Second of all I think that in order to set up a billing system so that this approach could work effectively would require an extreme amount of capital. Just think about it, they now have to develop a system that will integrate with every email provider and mobile phone provider in the country. Take a lesson from Canada, we have spent over 1 billion dollars trying to get a stupid gun registry off the ground...a fucking gun registry...a system that does nothing except store and grant access to names of people that own guns. That is seriously peanuts compared to the system it would take to implement this billing system correctly.
But if they want they can always outsource it me and I will guarantee that they wont be any worse off than Canada and that stupid registry. Give me a billion bucks and I can DEFINITELY give you a system that doesnt work.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
This is downright silly. Tax Email, and I'll Instant Message. Tax SMS and I'll Instant Message on my phone. Tax AIM, MSN, or Y! Instant Messaging, and I'll use another program, and another protocol. Unless they want to put a flat tax on UDP and TCP packets (I'm sure they'd like to), they're not getting any money from me.
This idea will never work, at least not for emails, and I tell you why. For a server, there is no fundamental difference between an email, a webpage, a file being sent, or whatever data goes through it. It is just data. True, there is a protocol attached to it, but when email gets taxed, people will make sure that email gets sent looking like a file. Sender and receiver need to know this, but if it is beneficial to a large enough group of people, this will become standard. Furthermore, how does the EU think they can tax my gmail? I mean, I send it from a server based in the US, and I receive my messages at the same server. How is the EU going to tax me for that? Are they going to ask Google for records? They'll get laughed away.
Maybe we should charge a tax on slashdot for each post you make. Would definitely sort out all the noise. This coming from an AC. :-)
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Seven Reasons This is a Really Really Bad Idea:
1. Implementation is tricky. Read any book on the TCP/IP protocal suite to see why.
2. The amount taxed will increase. We know this from the history of taxing itself. There is also the fact that money will be needed to determine how much a person is to be taxed.
3. This will require all currnet EU located email addresses to be "reregistered" so they can bill the email senders.
4. This will hamper communications especially in the area of internet groups. People will no longer be able to join large email based comminuties without a member getting stuck with the bill.
5. If the email servers do not bill their customers directly they will bill their advertisers more and that will increase internet prices hindering EU internet consumers.
6. If the email servers do not bill their customers directly they will bill their advertisers more and that will increase internet prices. I believe that increase in advertising price will force companys to abandon the EU mail server market and either look for other ways to increase product awareness or spend money in the US or emerging CHINA.
7. Enforcement. Will they spend money to monitor traffic and ensure a household pays its $.03 tax on a home email server.
And I've always thought this was a BAD idea for a long time, as it's the first step to killing off a vital portion of the internet.
News groups, discussion groups, SIGs, PACs, online communities, word/joke/whatever-of-the-day mailing lists, notification lists, and so on, all depend on free access to email. This is especially true for sites and services run by individuals, non-profits, and other organizations who are not businesses and usually have a hard enough time keeping their doors (sites) open.
Some businesses could pay for it, but do you think for a moment that those costs are not going to be passed on?
And stopping spam? Please. Hackers will setup their own servers in places that don't charge such taxes, or take over existing boxes in places that do, and in either case not pay a dime.
Besides, what do you want to bet that any email sent by the government will be exempt from such a tax? Of course they'll be free to spam us.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid idea. As others have said, it's nothing more than a shortsighted money grab, and we're the ones who'll be punished for it... in more ways than one.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The next tax that will be proposed is one on spoken words. Everyone will be required to carry a word counting device to be collected each month and your tax assesed. If you don't pay your vocal cords will be disconnected until you do. Think of the benefits! Your Uncle Ned, who talks your ear off at family gatherings about all the boring details of his life might just shut up when he can't buy food anymore. People will learn to convey ideas in the fewest amount of words possible, so you won't have to sit through long winded conversations just to find out what the weather is like.
Later on the sign language loophole will be closed to get those scofflaw mute people trying to evade the tax. After that we'll have a thought tax. The more you think, the more you owe. That one will be great at keeping the serfs in line.
AccountKiller
The whole "distribution of wealth" thing really is annoying. Take from those that want to excercise freedom to benefit those that don't ... and we'll just take our cut first. This kind of crap really is just the reductions of freedom under the guise of the greater good. Baloney!
Artifical Intelligience is no match for natural stupidity.
Not only does it cost the government ZERO, the cost per email is also ZERO (it's a flat monthly rate for unlimited email and/or internet access for the end user).
... um ... ZERO! But of course, the lack of any revenue per email will be made up for by the quantity of email. Zero times "some really huge number of emails" equals ... um ... uhhh ... that "really huge number" is too big for me or any politician to figure out off the tops of our heads, but I'm sure it equals some really big number.
So if they tax each email at a rate of, say, 25% per email, that would be 25% times ZERO equals
Government accounting at its finest.
-----
The primary source of computing troubles is between the chair and the keyboard.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
In the EU you can't get something for free (anti-monopolistic laws) so it has to be either inherited in the price or billed to the people.
That means that I still get billed, no matter how loud they yell "free SMS" for the subscription or the card, there is a maximum number of SMS I can send for that. Usually it costs about 5-15cents but could cost up to 1.5E per message. I get billed for that and since it's not a necessity I get taxed the highest possible rate (21% in Belgium). So now they want to tax extra per message? And why would that be? It's as stupid as the tax they have to pay for EMPTY MEDIA (yes, there is a special extra tax per disc) so-said to help the artists that lose money because you copy their stuff on such discs. Even if I burn my Ubuntu CD on that disc, I get taxed, even if they are just for backups.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Politicians keep on repeating why the EU is such a great thing for the citizens of EU countries. Fact is, the EU is power hungry as well as money hungry and taxing is a way to satisfy both needs. The reasoning that is used to justify an email tax or sms tax (or whatever tax they come up with) is ridiculous and shows the true nature of the beast. The EU started out as a great initiative but is slowly becoming a bureaucratic monster that is going to tax their citizens in addition to the already existing national and local taxes. The tax that's collected will then be used to create even more silly rules. And of course, according to the EU, this is all for the benefit of EU citizens.
Office Space. Watch what those peskey decimals could do for the gov.
The most horrible thing about this is that they can actually pull this off. There are many ways of getting web pages from blocked site A, past the censor, into my own system.
It's much harder with e-mail.
SMTP always uses port 25 . While it has become normal for many protocols to specify a port (http://www.example.com:12345) that's not possible with e-mail.
Anyone with an ISP that blocks port 25 knows that it's near impossible to do anything about it. Your only option is to host your SMTP server at another ISP.
If the EU declares that all ISP's should block port 25, except for their own (taxed) mail servers, there is not a lot one can do about it.
Some individual nerds will start using tunnels to remote systems, but for 99% of the population this is impossible. Any tool that would automatically circumvent the firewall would instantly be taken over by spammers.
Since SMS plans or individual text charges are subject to VAT.
Do we really need universities like those in Finland? Your comment suggest we don't.
When it's THEIR thing that is being taxed!
Now that the government is eliminating the phone tax, the U.S. needs an email tax to continue funding the Spanish-American war! REMEMBER THE MAINE!!!!
Not just for consumers, of course. Make sure you tax government & corporate packets, too. And implement the tax per-ip.
Probably easier than taxing e-mails/SMS, too; with less chance of falsification, and a more reliable metric (usage costs per e-mail is completely goofy; usage cost per packet makes slightly more sense).
*giggle*. I'd love to see a per-packet EU tax.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Deja vu.
Have you read my blog lately?
Unless they apply legislation to the smtp protocol and require that every single mail server use government supplied and licensed software this is unenforceable.
If they monitor at the ISP smtp gateway then we go back to routing smtp directly, if they monitor at internet connections then we encapsulate and encrypt the packets in http packets so they cannot detect it as email.
However they try to do this we are dealing with government systems that move at a snails pace whereas open source moves at light speed in comparison... It will never work.
It is unenforceable...
'Exchanges between countries have ballooned, so everyone would understand that the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU,' he said." Benefits engendered by the EU? How brazen are these people? The only reason exchanges ballooned between the citizens of the EU is because the treaties between those citizen's governments eliminated a few of the barriers those self-same governments had set up in the first place. In other words, the entire benefit of the EU is getting the governments out of the way of their citizens' border-crossing business. That benefit comes from governments doing less. And I'm not surprised that these jerkfaces are trying to find a way to get people to pay them for a benefit they can't provide in the first place.
Taxes are generally in support of a particular expense/medium. What would email or SMS taxes be supporting?
Education taxes are for schools, etc
Gas taxes are for road maintenance, etc
So if I were an EU citizen what would I get from this tax? I don't know how their phone carriers work, but I'd imagine that the lines for internet are either already/mostly paid for, possibly all by private companies that sell the service, and the cell towers would be put up by the cellular companies.
So, other than money-grabbing, what - if any - do the EU governments do that justifies them in taxation of email, SMS, or otherwise?
Is the American theme with everything and flag a hint of who is really behind all this? or is "EU" a new state?
yes yes, i know it's the politics.slashdot.org theme but geesh. Slashdot (should have?) stopped being a US-only website a long time ago (if it ever really was).
[alk]
sms is charged at a ludicrous £/E rate/MB to start with.
and charging a tax on each email??
What confusion of basic moneygrabbing greed, nonsense and outright stupidity is caused by the crack these folk are on, seriously?
There's just no words for this, only a sequence of dots at the end of this sentence.....
Err.. just to point out, why is an EU politics matter anounced under a US flag?
I'm curious about it.
"...so everyone would understand that the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU"
Did the EU invent texting before or after Al Gore invented the internet?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Firstly, it's just plain friggin stupid to have a tax on SMS, it's a neiche which doesn't have any goverment inolvement.
Two, we already pay sales tax on SMSs when the bill come through, and a stealth tax because phone companies need to claw back the money they spent on licencing next-gen radio bands though there most profitable area, SMS messages.
Three, theve got some fucking cheek "benefits engendered by the EU" lets see, apart from licencing bands to companies at insane prices, I don't think theve done anything... The benefit engendered by the EU, is we pay more for our SMSs, other than that you can get SMSs pretty much anywhere in the world where there's enough people to justify mobile phone coverage.
I've recently found myself explaining to people why the US has added a tax onto their telephone bills to help fund the Spanish/American war, a war which ended over 108 years ago. Why is there an 18% tax on alcohol in Philadelphia to help fund WWII, and other silly rider taxes.
Which brings me to my point.
They'd tax air if they think they could get away with it.
Every day, everywhere, bureaucrats and politicians think of new things to tax--to raise money.
... well, smog again).
Taxes are meant as TOOLS either to offset costs for government (like how gas taxes are supposed to offset the costs of building and maintaining roads, police, etc.) or to discourage harmful behaviour (like smoking or
When someone in the government says, "we need to raise money. What's not being taxed (enough)?", the obvious answer is stupidity.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I'm a spammer. Allow me to make this offer in best of most secure confidence, etc...
You send me your bank account number and I'll...um...start paying you to receive my spam! I'll give you FIVE DOLLARS USD for each spam message I send.
Thanks for doing business.
Germany tried this in the early 80's, as networks became available to corporations. The Deutsche Bundespost Telekom wanted to charge per email message. The network operator I worked for just declared the email system to be a fancy file transfer application, and got away without paying the tax. This time, with SMS, the telco is the operator, and is more than happy to collect a tax in exchange for monopoly rights.
:)
By this reasoning, e-mail is taxed, too. Except that you pay 0$ per e-mail, and a 18% tax on top of that (or however much it currently is wherever "you" live...)
I think the idea would be a constant tax per e-mail - 0.1 cent per e-mail, or something like that (I guess just
(amount of money italian government wants to have)/(# of e-mails sent) )
This article advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
Lets call them notSMS and notEmail, identical to SMS and Email in every way except by name. Or they will create entirely new, but functionally equivalent untaxed protocols.
This could be actually a good thing as people could finally understand that VPNs and encrypting of transport layer really are worth of the little added effort.
That way, if they can not distinguish types of traffic, we can force the adversary to resort to taxing per byte, which will pit them against the video-over-IP content lobbyists with deep pockets, which will buy us additional cost that is bearable for high-bandwidth video and virtually zilch per one-line message.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
If the EU were to do this they would:
;o).
1) Piss of everybody for little gain
2) Stifel competition for EU countries
3) Increase racisim by reducing open commuinication
4) End up spending way more on IT security as there are soo many people, let alone SMSing kiddies who can, could and would end up relaying every bit of information and price about viagra etc of ALOT of EU/goverment computers.
5) Be the laughing stock of the World and I for one would insist on being outsourced to India to avoid such a silly tax that is another step in fucking over the IT inductry like IR35.
On the other hand I will have to insist that they pay for my work clothes or refund ALL tax - and refund and alow me to offset my train travel. I will then get very anal and nit picky and show the goverment what red tape and polical fall-out can realy look like.
Now how about a constructive form of making money - internet driving licsence's -- would ilimenat idjiots who cant use computers. Help those that cant to realise they cant and get them help and would be nice Internet ID card. That said if you know what your doing - what ID card
So in summary
Oi EU No.
I assume the email tax only applies to emails sent throught the mobile network... However when you consider how many ugly phone masts have been dotted around the country, even in beauty spots, this just seems like governments getting compensation over the fact they subtract from the attractiveness of their surroundings. Given that, other than the spectrum licencing, little money goes to the government for mobile masts (it goes to the landowners), this seems like a good way for the phone companies to pay for their effect. However the cost would no doubt be passed onto the consumers...
Well, duh, they will tax it with a flat rate. The article says 1 cent for 100,000 emails.