Slashdot Mirror
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."
Good luck taxing e-mails sent from privately maintained offshore servers. :P
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
How about not forcing the postal service to keep 75 years' worth of back-funding for pensions?
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
It's a cute idea, but clearly this city councilperson doesn't understand how email works.
I don't respond to AC's.
where else will i go to meet and talk to people i know for an hour or two at a time? its like a town meeting square where people go for hours just to stand around
Berkeley is a college town, so a large block of voters are students with no long term interest in the community. So a lot of kooks get elected.
Dear nitwit,
Your post 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
(X) 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
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) 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
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) 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
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) 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
(X) 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:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
[x] You're an idiot
[x] It's a dumb idea
[x] Email doesn't work like that
[x] You're an idiot
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
After all, who are we to say that buggy whip manufacturers are any less deserving of our support?
Do I put the stamp on my monitor or insert it into my computer's cup holder?
For only a few dollars extra per car, all the blacksmiths would still be in business.
So what this guy wants is to tax a service that the USPS doesn't provide, to help fund the USPS. That's fucking idiotic. Second, if you want to reduce the cost of the USPS, don't stop delivery on Saturday. Stop it on EVERY day of the week, except one. It's 2013 and nobody uses the USPS for anything that is time sensitive. The only thing I get in my mail is junk. I have a trash min literally at my door, just so I can reach out the door, get the mail, and directly dump it into the trash every day. Anything that is a package, I get through UPS or FEDEX or DHL. Almost everything else is handled online. I do not need mail delivery five or six days every fucking week just for the one letter that a person might send me two or three times a year. Weekly delivery would completely suffice.
Like the ISP with google, you fail to remember that everyone with a network connection already pays for this access to their ISP.
Also, no one ever sends spam from their own computer, what do you think all the hacked windows botnets are used for? This would just make innocent people get smallish extra charges added to their normal ISP bill, and won't cost anything to the senders of spam.
Best case scenario if they managed to make this stupid idea into reality is that ordinary folks at home will pay more attention to computer security to make sure they won't get charged those extra dollars each month.
c++;
The day after email is taxed is the day fmail is created.
__
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
>> "Good idea; I wish there were a way to implement it."
Your time would be better spent trying to save the Buggy Whip industry. They haven't been doing so well since the arrival of the horseless carriage.
You do have a Buggy Whip in your car, yes? If not, you're part of the problem.
How about we levy a $10,000 "tax" for politicians that introduce stupid legislation.
sudo make me a sandwich
Those polititians can't fix the real issues, so they dream up nonsense to make headlines and get reelected.
There is enough money around to fix all problems, it's not used properly by the people controlling it.
Why exactly do we want to find yet another way to siphon money from the public to maintain an obsolete business model that, as far as I can tell, exists solely to deliver snail-spam to my door?
I have no objection to paying $4.99 to FedEx for the once or twice each year I actually send something in a #10 envelope... As long as it means the literally hundreds useless catalogs (plus credit card and life insurance offers, plus political fliers in even-numbered years) I get per year need to do the same - By which I mean, hopefully that would effectively end unsolicited commercial/charitable/political mail.
You do have a Buggy Whip in your car, yes?
Well sure! How else are we supposed to fend off the street urchins?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"Very tiny tax"? That's how they all start off. Just pay us a little more. It's not much, so you shouldn't complain. And then it becomes a little more. And a little more. And a little more, until suddenly you find more than a quarter of your annual income is going to fund all kinds of crap you never wanted in the first place.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... this is so lame! Think how much better it would be to put a tax on verbs! Then you could derive income from speech, text, posts, signage, display, heck, even thinking!
Why not? Fedex and UPS have perfected delivery of packages so why not the mail? I'm not sure what magic the USPS possesses that private industry couldn't do better anyway. Barring that, how about mail rates that make sense ? I live in Maryland and it doesn't make sense to me that I can send a piece of first class mail to New York City and Nome Alaska for the same price.
The buggy whip industry died (and is used as a common example because it died) as a result of something better that completely and utterly replaced the horse drawn carriage. Unfortunately, its a bad example to use because often, especially in debates here on Slashdot, the industry being compared has not been replaced either in whole or in part.
I'm not defending the point of the article, but email has only replaced a small part of the packet mail delivery industry - I can't send a physical item through email, I can't send documents I need to confirm someone at the other end received, I can't get an email insured etc etc etc.
Yes, the packet mail delivery industry is suffering, and it needs to do one or more of three things - raise prices, find other revenue sources or lower costs.
It might work, but there may be a bit of collateral damage.
Good grief! And how exactly is it that the post office is due ANY funds from an email someone sends??? If they want more funds they should EARN it like the rest of us have to, not steal it from someone else that has earned it. If they're not making enough to keep things going then they should do like any other business and manage their costs and set prices appropriately.
The buggy whip industry died (and is used as a common example because it died) as a result of something better that completely and utterly replaced the horse drawn carriage. Unfortunately, its a bad example to use because often, especially in debates here on Slashdot, the industry being compared has not been replaced either in whole or in part.
New technology almost never wipes out the old. We still have horse carriages in downtown Montreal. There are still practical reasons to ride a horse: we have cops that do.
We will still have old school mail as well as old school radio in 20 years. It won't go away. It just becomes less economically important.
And our tax dollars already go towards the up keep of the internet's infrastructure.
Exactly. It would be useful (though probably impossible) if the small cost associated with each email were charged to the sender instead of picked up by everyone. If you got 1000 emails for a penny most people would spend very little each year, but the scams and spams that work if 1 in 100,000 people spend £20 would no longer be viable.
Also, no one ever sends spam from their own computer, what do you think all the hacked windows botnets are used for? This would just make innocent people get smallish extra charges added to their normal ISP bill, and won't cost anything to the senders of spam.
People who put insecure computers on the global network are not innocent. They're negligent. You want to really do something about that problem, start fining them.
If I put a big truck on the highway and I don't secure my cargo, I get to pay for any damage it does. Same principle. You are responsible for your property and any damage it causes on a shared, public resource.
I'm sure they can make a convincing puppy-eyes at you. So what? Stop excusing them. The damage they facilitate is very real.
If people really find the postal system so useful they should be willing to pay more for it. This is a solution in search of a problem.
Actually, the packet mail delivery industry isn't suffering. FedEx, UPS, and DHL are all doing fine - it's only the US Postal Service that's having problems. A big part of their problems are caused by government regulation, which many see as being designed to try to get rid of the USPS. See http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/03/04/how-the-postal-service-is-being-gutted.aspx for fuller explanations.
no, that comparison really isnt relevant here.
you have to step back and ask what, ultimately, is the purpose of the Postal Service?
Answer: To faciliate communication between peoples.
Before the postal service letter writing was rather risky. You pay some random person to deliver a message...never knowing whether he would actually do so. He may keep the money and toss it in the trash. he may read it himself. He may deliver it to wrong person. Etc etc.
The postal service eliminated all of that uncertainty, and in doing so, enabled people far across the new country to communicate freely, further enabling and enhancing those rights we also put in the Constitution.
These days, not many people right letters. True
But that doesnt mean there is no longer a need to facilitate and maintain reliable communication between peoples.
The method has chaned, but not the need. Comcast, Cox, AT&T, etc, are under no real obligation to actually deliver and maintain email service. They are much more like the random person you hired to deliver a message in the town he already happened to be going to.
And as such, I could see the USPS being one of the protectors of the open internet. In fact, it's likely a better one than the FCC, as opponents of the FCC keep trying to have it determines that the internet was not within the FCC's orignal charter, and the FCC itself was less about facilitating communication, than about sherparding the public resource we call the "airwaves". But the USPS is in the constituion itself.
(Though honestly, I would see sheparding of the internet as being a combined effort of the two agnecies)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Didn't Bill Gates suggest this a long while back?
Yes, he did. About 10 years ago, IIRC. It was a stupid idea back then, and it still is now (even more so).
Back then, spam was mostly sent from hit-and-run accounts and open email relays. (So the spammers would be difficult to track down.)
Nowadays, they use botnets. Infected users would get charged for the spam flow. Some of them might not even notice the extra costs on their ISP bill.
WWTTD?
to add to myself:
As interpreted and implemented "USPS is legally obligated to serve all Americans, regardless of geography, at uniform price and quality."
And "primarily to facilitate interstate communication"
Can you think of a better way to justify creating universal internet access with a minimum acceptable quality of service?
I think it's a damned good way to go about it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
"Basically, emails do have a cost" ... none of which is borne by government, so imposed tax money that goes to it merely serves to punish rather than pay for the cost.
in fact, to further add to myself: the post office owned and operated the first telegraph lines. so there is precedent.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
And our tax dollars already go towards the up keep of the internet's infrastructure.
Ah, I love slashdot, where people simultaneously advocate anarchy, libertarianism, and socialism.
Yes, that's correct: we pay for the infrastructure with tax dollars (which would be socialism). Also, each person who pays for their connection also pays their ISP (which would be capitalism). This is true. So?
OK, here's the introduction to economics lecture. As a general rule, economic systems run more efficiently when people pay for the resources that they use, and run inefficiently when other people pay for resources that somebody else uses. Just a general rule to keep in mind.
Indeed, economic systems do not always run on this model (no, not even in ideal free markets). One example is the "all you can eat buffet." People don't pay proportionally to how much food they, primarily because the cost of the food itself is actually only a small portion of the total cost, and detailed accounting for the food eaten costs more than the trivial economic benefit gained. Yes, you can argue that e-mail is similar to that: the incremental cost of an e-mail (economists would say "marginal cost") is small compared to the cost of just keeping the network alive (however, email by nature goes through a series of computers between the sender and the recipient; so accounting would be less expensive than paying human waiter writing down orders on a pad.)
But the "all you can take" model relies on the implicit assumption that individual consumers do have a limit. If a semitrailer backs up to the all-you-can-take buffet, loads everything on the buffet into the trailer, and says to the cook "just keep it coming," the model will fail.
Like most of economics, then, there isn't always one price structure that works for all situations. There's always a trade-off of cost against benefit.
However, the knee-jerk reaction "put a cost on email! How dare anybody suggest such a thing!" seems a bit extreme. There are advantages in people paying for the resources that they use. There are also problems (which in economics, translates to "costs").
So, thanks for all the criticism, but I'll stick by what I wrote originally:
Good idea. Only problem: how could we implement it?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The post office can be completely self-sustaining. The problem is that the idiots in congress are forcing it to pre-fund pensions for the next 75 years.
An unfunded pension liability merely externalizes the risk of default - Company goes under, bam, you have tens of thousands of retirees and near-retirees on welfare until the mercy of death gives them back the dignity they worked fair 'n square for. Forcing a company (including the post office) to fully fund their pension system does not count as frivolous political posturing, but sound and necessary fiscal policy.
That said, we can certainly agree that congress deserves its share of the blame, for example by not allowing the USPS to raise rates, close offices, and shorten their hours as needed. Though even then, as I said, the USPS brings me nothing but crap; I would honestly prefer it go under even without any financial savings.
First off, this fellow in a city council has no responsibility for the funding of the USPS.
Second, he has no ability to tax anyone outside his city - does he propose that Berkley alone fund the USPS?
Third, the issue with USPS solvency is, for the most part, inflicted upon the USPS by Congress, which has decided that since the USPS was profitable in 2006, that it should fully-fund 75 years of pension obligations by the end of 2016. This has resulted in over-funding the pension fund beyond any reasonable requirement by any conventional funding formula, and if you look closely, the losses the USPS reported these last few years is only slightly more than the annual over-payment of the pension system.
Ken
Spammers already don't care about the law. Who in their right mind would think they would pay the tax? The lusers of the zombied computers will be ones stuck with the bill.
The Post office managed to have two deliveries a day and one on Saturday for the longest time, profitably. It's not what's killing them.
Having become seriously top-heavy and over-regulated by bean counters who need to see justifications for all expenses (at costs higher than the expenses) is part of the problem. The bulk e-mail agreements and deals like UPS dropping off packages at the post office and having them deliver it for a pittance is what's killing them.
I.e. increased commercialization.
Mail is a utility, and needs to be treated as such. They can't fulfil their obligation to deliver mail if they are also to compete on packages, bulk delivery, and express.
They need to go back to what they were, and the free market evangelists need to keep their hands in their pockets where utilities are concerned. They can be profitable, but not on a free market.
Most mail needs to go into a "we'll deliver it when most cost effective; max of 14 days". Just build up the mail to a certain area until it gets "full", then deliver it. Some areas would only have deliveries once a week. Others would be every day. You can then have a real "first class" mail that would be delivered more often.
Basically, introduce a "second class" mail. And price the first class MUCH higher.
If ISP's blocked outbound SMTP traffic everywhere (except to the ISP email servers). Consumer should be able easily to opt out of this. Then, even if the home computer was botted, no spam would be sent via the typical smtp channel. Webmail providers would have further incentive not to allow spamming via their network.
So, some parts of the tech-fix approach are feasible -- other parts are not.
I'd have to agree. What we really need to do shift from an address based physical mail to a person based official national email program. Everyone would be given a official email and CAC card. The CAC would be necessary for log in and document signing. The emails would be part of a publicly searchable contact directory. A small artificial cost would be applied to the sender to avoid abuse from advertising/SPAM agencies. All official government correspondence would be sent and received through said email program. Any document signed with the CAC would be seen as legally strong as a physical document signed by a handwritten signature. All libraries would be fitted with document scanners, computers, and CAC readers for those that do not have said equipment at home. Ideally, all government paper forms would be converted to digital forms. All correspondence or notifications could optionally be freely forward to your personal email so that you know when to check your government email.
As far as the transport of non-message objects goes, we could either have a post office that delivers mail only a couple times a week or simply go completely private (UPS, Fedex, etc.).
Is it really suffering, because of the internet there is access to more suppliers than ever before. Where you might have gone to a local store and bought what they had that was close to what you actually wanted now you get what you want and at some point it gets shipped to you.
If anything the internet is helping support the postal service through increased long distance trading. Post Offices do suffer somewhat since their role is increasingly marginal, however they could be revived if redefined and they acted more as distribution centres. It would be far more convenient to go to the local post office to collect an item rather than having to arrange a different delivery time take time off to wait for the item or locate the remote depot that is open until about an hour after you get off work when travelling anywhere is at its slowest.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Most mail needs to go into a "we'll deliver it when most cost effective; max of 14 days".
I really like this idea. Seems like they'd be spending resources where they are really needed. Rural places like where I live would get less frequent deliveries than cities and I'm okay with that. Like you mentioned, there's First Class if you really need something delivered soon-ish. To some degree, this system is already appearing with the end of Saturday deliveries.
Bigby for president!
It wouldn't necessarily impossible. I have said for a decade that the post office should get in to the email game. This would be one revenue source for them. Charge a small fee for email delivery through their relay. Then the rest of us could set our email servers to only accept email from white listed domains and addresses. This would cause all of the cost to be front loaded on the initial contact. Thus legitimate email would be very close to free, and spam would be really expensive.
This could be even better if our smtp standard could be enhanced with a 'you are not white listed, send via usps relay' error message. This way out going email could function as it currently does for users and admins could set their own cost budgeting policies.
The USPS isn't losing money, their budgetary problems stem from Congress, who mandated that they fund their entire pension system 75 years into the future. Nobody else is under those constraints. Without that artificial baggage, they make a profit every year.
Free Martian Whores!
That's what they had before.
There's a reason why your stamps say "first class".
What happened is that they got rid of second class mail. And instead introduced bulk mail for companies. A bad trade, if you ask me.
I also miss air mail with its rice paper, cross-written to save weight.
And our tax dollars already go towards the up keep of the internet's infrastructure.
I'm sorry, but this is so incorrect that it isn't funny. The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned. Since then, what you know as "The Internet" in the U.S. has been carried on private equipment and circuits. The exception is the U.S. government's own infrastructure, and they're just like any other ISP, carrying traffic for their own departments and agencies.
I find it interesting that one of the "regulations gutting the USPS" is that it is being required to fund its pension plan with today's dollars.
My financial advisers tell me to put money into my 401k or IRA now. Pre-tax income, in a fund that generally keeps up with inflation. ... mostly.
Ok, sounds fine. But what if you were required by law to put in enough money -today- to be able to fully fund the next 80 years of your life?
The USPS is the victim of Congressmen who want to gut it, so they inserted a clause in a bill to ensure that the USPS funds the pensions today of future workers who are not yet born. No other business would have to put up with that.
Wait, what? Those are very real pension costs. Are you suggesting they just ignore them so they can "show" a profit?
You aren't, by chance a Chicago alderman or a California house member are you? That's what they've been doing for a long time and in case you haven't noticed, that hasn't worked out very well. Of course, it's still ongoing and things could change but their budgets are fucked. And they are fucked specifically because of pensions.