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."
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!
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.
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).