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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."
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.
I think it's used quite a bit more over here because we don't have to pay for receiving.
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
I think that it is quite obvious that the intent is you'll be getting it at both ends ;)
No Comment.
Now the EU is moving in on our American urban legends!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Well, IIRC, it was an EU move to make it illegal to charge extortionate roaming rates on mobile phones. That's one way.
I think we have a language barrier issue. Here in the UK, a publican is a person who runs a pub, serving beer to the thirsty masses. Firing large numbers of publicans at any point in the economic cycle would be an inadvisable course of action for any politicians to contemplate.
Oh no... it's the future.
That's what you get for breathing fancy bottled air. Regular air not good enough for you? Too lazy to grow gills?
Man, you really need that seminar!