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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
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.
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.
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.
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.'"
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
Now the EU is moving in on our American urban legends!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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?
Well, that's not really what's suggested. They state that the fees are to offset the governments general defecit, spam reduction would simply be a spin they might put on it to try to make the pill easier for you to swallow.
As for your idea about controlling spam though, I've always thought the way it should work is like this:
1) Do you mind if I contact you via this channel?
2) Nope, not if you mind paying me $x.xx every time you do so.
3) [Latest advert] [$x.xx] in MY bank account
No Comment.
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!
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).
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.
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.
This is why we don't want Europe controlling the internet.
"...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.
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.