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."
I think it's used quite a bit more over here because we don't have to pay for receiving.
Take a look at for instanceo
http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lass
USA is the #1 spammer. Granted, the EU is not counted as total but I can tell you that most of the EU countries have always had quite strictly regulated telecommunication markets. Some countries practically are not sending any spam at all because the spamming open proxy owners would get cut off in minutes by the core network administrations.
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!
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!
With the exception that spam doesn't come from spammers, it comes from millions of innocent zombie machines sending them out.
Of course, there is more to it than just the technical issues. CDMA is thoroughly patented by Qualcomm, while GSM is controlled by a different set of companies (e.g. Nokia). (Qualcomm's recent litigation in the area notwithstanding). So patent license politics clearly play a role in adoption as well.