City Councilman: Email Tax Could Discourage Spam, Fund Post Office Functions

New submitter Christopher Fritz writes "The Berkeley, CA city council recently met to discuss the closing of their downtown post office, in attempt to find a way to keep it from relocating. This included talk of 'a very tiny tax' to help keep the U.S. Post Office's vital functions going. The suggestion came from Berkeley City Councilman Gordon Wozniak: 'There should be something like a bit tax. I mean a bit tax could be a cent per gigabit and they would still make, probably, billions of dollars a year And there should be, also, a very tiny tax on email.' He says a one-hundredth of a cent per e-mail tax could discourage spam while not impacting the typical Internet user, and a sales tax on Internet transactions could help fund 'vital functions that the post office serves.' We all know an e-mail tax is infeasible, and sales tax for online purchases and for digital purchases are likely unavoidable forever, but here's hoping talk of taxing data usage doesn't work its way to Washington."

Comments

Good idea

[Geoffrey.landis]

Good idea; I wish there were a way to implement it.

Basically, emails do have a cost, both a real cost in the connections and computers that transmit and store them, and a time cost in the time I spend deleting them, and the fact that the senders don't bear this cost means that they overuse the resource. Hard to calculate that cost, but the hardware alone is certainly more than 0.01 cent per email if it's correctly pro-rated-- maintaining the internet is not without cost. A 0.1 cent per email cost would mean nothing to me, or to any legitimate users, but would stop indiscriminate spam.

Good idea. Only problem: how could we implement it?