Slashdot Mirror
UN Proposes Email Tax
El Jefe writes "No, this isn't an email hoax: The UN has proposed an email tax of roughly 1 cent per 100 emails sent by an individual to help pay for bringing the Internet to developing countries. The only good part in all this is that they have no power to enforce this, and it is "merely a suggestion". "
As yuck as it seems, I think that a tax like this will do a
lot to curb spammers (suddenly sending out a message to your
million addresses costs a hundred bucks. Still a bargain, but it
ain't free any more) and it would benefit the countries coming
late to the net party. But I suspect it will meet pretty strong
resistance.
If it would actually accomplish any amount of good it wouldn't bother me at all. It won't accomplish anything so it does bother me. A lot of these underdeveloped nations have problems that make lack of internet access absolutely trivial in comparision. Little things like little water that we'd consider drinkable, lack of the ability to even farm at a scale large enough to support the community, lack of an educational system that might allow a few people to make it out alive, lack of anything greater than late 19th century medical technology, the presence of a government that feels the need to commit genocide against its own people. Just so that matter can be made even worse how about rampant overpopulation and birthrate.
A far more useful thing would be to encourage or enforce birth control to keep the populations in check with the carrying capacity of the land. Harsh? Yes. Is it any harsher than referring to the deaths of civilians (of any side) as collateral damage during any war-like campaign? No.
In most of these countries it won't be the people who get internet access, it'll be the oppressive government which also happens to keep their people in the dark ages.
There are a few separate issues when dealing with welfare-as-social-problem.
1. As a whole, American society does a lot to discourage intelligence. This goes up exponentially in under-class neighborhoods.
2. Money for welfare, and the minimum wage, take a one-size-fits-all approach that ignores little problems like cost-of-living.
3. Welfare as it is currently set up discourages families from staying together, and people from finding work. Not surprising, since it was originally set up as sort of a "pension plan" for widows with young children, until they could find another husband to provide for them.
Speaking from personal experience of having recently been unemployed for a month, being out of work is demoralizing. It is depressing. Helplessness sets in pretty damn fast for some people. And I know I have a good skill set and good references, and a father who will bail me out of severe financial problems. For someone who has none of these things, being out of work can be outright terrifying, and welfare or illegal activities their only way to survive.
Vicious cycle, anyone? Again from personal experience, I used to spend a lot of time with a group of friends my cousin refers to as "The Lost Boys" (I was Wendy, basically). They were around my age (I'm 21; they range from 19-22), had all dropped out or flunked out of college, had part-time jobs at pizza parlors or Wal-Mart (or no jobs at all), and still lived with their parents.
I haven't lived with my parents since I was 16 (though they were still helping me financially until slightly after I got out of college, and will still bail me in a crisis). I got my degree when I was 19. I had/have a full time non-WalMart job (at the time it was in the security vault of a bank, now it's at the local utility company as a technical writer).
Being around the Lost Boys was kind of frightening for me, even though one is my ex and one (slightly more responsible and level-headed than the rest) is my boyfriend. None of them are stupid. But only one of them (my boyfriend) gives a damn of ever making anything of himself. (Well, except for the one who predicts a Shadowrun-like scenario in the aftermath of Y2K and thinks he's going to be this powerful wizard, but that's another story!)
And these are all guys with successful, intelligent parents. One has a very "together" younger sister. They have examples. The folks my age in the underclass tend not to have very good examples.
One of the reasons my boyfriend and I don't hang out with them much anymore is the anti-success peer pressure. They seemed to find it amusing that I didn't want to sit in Denny's until 2:30 AM on a weekday because I had to be at work at 8 the next morning. "Corporate drone!" they say. Yeah, but I have rent to pay, unlike some people. Better to be a corporate drone with my OWN roof over my OWN head than a bum sponging off Mommy and Daddy or Big Brother. But a scary amount of people don't see it that way.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
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I suppose he is a Web Century or so behind the times in terminology, but that doesn't affect the accuracy of his arguments nor the quality of his expression, both of which I thought were high.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 1983, I didn't have much money. So I lived in a cruddy slum-class building in Venice. Members of the underclass are very much interested in the con, very much interested in working as little as they can, and very keen on consuming as many illegal drugs as humanly possible. You really have to see this up close to understand the original poster's comment. I have developed a theory that the closer to the poor you are, the less you sympathise with them. I was close to the poor for a number of years, and that's cured me of any charitable impulses I might have had. The poor that I saw fully deserved to be poor.
I don't think this is exclusively a racial thing; it's cultural. Whether black or brown or white or purple, people with underclass attitudes act in underclass ways. True, more blacks have this attitude than whites, but the problem is more universal than most people want to think - and the solutions are personal and have nothing to do with the acts of other groups.
D
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If the UN cannot collect from its member nations, what hope does it have to collect from Joe Spammer??
There is no email program out there that really fits those adjectives, but every commercial alternative to sendmail I know of is much less a candidate for the same description.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
[my idealist side:]
Even a penny per message*recipent. I could mail to my heart's content and still spend less than I blow on Snickers and Coke (the cola), and if that would help others get in on the fun who couldn't otherwise, great!
[my cynical side:]
Of course, the sad reality is that the administration would cost more than the revenues, and even if they did squeeze any cash out of it, it probably wouldn't end up in the intended hands.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Besides, we all know the Rosicrucian's are manipulating the Jaycees, who are using the influence of the international banking cartels and the Gnomes of Zurich to have The Vast Right-Wing conspiracy manipulate UN policy through their devious front, FEMA.
I know its true, because my Ouija board said so! And I heard the time traveler (who was also the Antichrist) discussing it with Art Bell last week.
Ow, my headache is back. I think I need to double up on the tinfoil...
:)
Lotek---
If, as part of my ISP signup, my ISP asked me, "Would you like us to add an additional 50 cents to your bill which would go to a UN fund to aid in the development of the Internet in lesser-fortunate countries?"
I'd say "Sure, that sounds nifty."
Even if it was just a general-purpose "Internet for the poorer" type of fund, I'd still have no problem spending an extra 50 cents a month for it.
Using a flat-rate voluntary fee would have a minimal impact on the ISP (they just have to write a check each month) and the administrative/collection requirements on the part of the organization collecting the money would be trivial in comparison with a "tax".
From: Seth Finkelstein
- --------------------- Seth Finkelstein Consulting Web Programmer sethf@mit.edu
Subject: Re: UN Proposes Global Email Tax
Posted to Cyberia-L
----------------------
From: Seth Finkelstein Subject: Re: UN Proposes Global Email Tax
THERE IS NO GLOBAL EMAIL TAX IN THE WORKS!
This looks likes the sort of thing which will get vectored by the Libertarian and the gullible (by no means disjoint sets!), and receive lots of help from hype-mongering "reporters" who seem to have invented the Internet's own particular version of yellow journalism (instead of *pedophiles* lurking in the Net to _molest_ *your children*, it's the *UN* trying to _tax_ *your email*). There is a report dozens and dozens of pages long, http://www.undp.org/hdro/contents.html on all sorts of weighty topics having to do with world populations, globalization and the Internet. In it, there are A FEW SENTENCES, which read as follows:
"There is an urgent need to find the resources to fund the global communications revolution -- to ensure that it is truly global. One proposal is a "bit tax" -- a very small tax on the amount of data sent through the Internet. The costs for users would be negligible: sending 100 emails a day, each containing a 10-kilobyte document (a very long one), would raise a tax of just 1 cent. Yet with email booming worldwide, the total would be substantial. In Belgium in 1998, such a tax would have yielded $10 billion. Globally in 1996, it would have yielded $70 billion -- more than total official development assistance that year."
And later, reprised:
"* New funding mechanisms should be created to ensure that the information revolution leads to human development, not human polarization. Two proposals -- a bit tax and a patent tax -- would raise funds from those who already have access to technology and use them to help extend the benefits more widely."
That's it. Just a *mention* of a *proposal*, nothing more than the outline of a vague idea. There are plenty of other ideas mentioned in the report, e.g. "Alternatively, funding could be reallocated from the research subsidies, grants and tax breaks now given to industry." and "Citizens could be given tax credits for contributing care services that develop long-term relationships between individuals.".
I hope I've helped stop an urban-legend-in-the-making, but I'm scared that the meme is going to be just too attractive.
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Still, the tax proposed here is ridiculously high. I just checked my stats for the past two months at home, and I've averaged about 200mb/day. This tax proposes one cent per megabyte, which works out to $60/month. I pay $50/month for my cable internet access, so this would be a 120% tax! Ouch.
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The first thing I thought of when I read about this issue is the proverbial "nose of the camel". I was pleased to see that the first few messages to scroll across my screen had already nailed the issue. :)
But, at the risk of being moderated down for redundancy, I'll add my spin...
Once people are used to thinking about a *tiny tax* for a *good cause* the battle is lost. After that, there will be no single event left (the introduction of internet taxes) to focus the resistance.
Once you concede the principle, all that is left is to haggle over the price.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
this reminds me, the USPS has recently decided that quasi-anonymous mailboxes (like MailBoxes, Etc) are bad, and that starting *this fall* all users of such mailboxes are required to: present two forms of identification with your real physical address, update this information quarterly, and also place a bogus 'PMB' on your mailbox address - or they won't deliver it.
This is big-brotherism at it's best. Screws over: battered wives hiding from their ex-husbands, people who don't *have* a fixed address (boat-people), and misanthropes like me who just don't like giving their physical address to just anyone.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
Somehow the majority of Slashdot posters have gotten this notion of the grand individual and their right to non-intereference into their heads. Civilization as we know it is an immense social effort. National governments, international bodies, other organizations, societies are not some kind of disease, they arose through necessity. The Jesse Helmsian mindset is very irritating.
Soon the repubs will run this country to the ground with their isolationism and anti-social(istic) efforts. Like a competing species of fungii, when one population dies, others will flourish with the nutrients available. We can choose to go along with the other countries by helping them now, or we can fall by the wayside. Don't depend on the bubble to sustain this country, another Reagan is enough to run it to the ground again.
One of the 4 elements of a super-power is the diplomacy - that's relations with other countries.
The part of this that bothers me the most isn't even financial or tied to free-flow-of-information issues. It's the possible ruin of the beautiful simplicity of email as it is right now. Now, email is a built in capability of any unix installation at a nice low level. A simple, small, time tested bulletproof gem of a program (sendmail) routes it around with beautiful simplicity. It works across intranets and the internet with very little maintanence at all. I like that.
:-(
With any kind of proposed restriction, like a tax, suddenly you need this huge, high maintanence infrastructure in place just to take a very little amount from each person (probably under a buck a year). ANd from a tax system like this, more restrictions would naturally follow - it would be a crime to send a message that does not end up being recorded for tax purposes. And what do you do about anonymous email (things sent through cypherpunks and mixmaster remailers)? Administrators would have to keep detailed logs and send them to washington.
In short, the simple, functional, utilitarian beauty of electronic mail would be gone forever.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. And I don't know which is worse--that the U.N. proposed this silliness; or that Wired, Slashdot, and all the Slashdot netizens missed the absolutely glaring error in the proposal.
Ms. Kate Raworth projects that this 1-cent per hundred "lengthy" Emails (not just any Email, but "lengthy" E-mails) would have raised $70 billion in the U.S. alone in 1996.
DO THE MATH!!!!!
That's 700,000,000,000,000 (7.0e14) Email messages. Seven hundred trillion Email messages. Figure the U.S. population as 245 million--that would mean that every man, woman, and child in the U.S. sent a "lengthy" Email every 11 seconds for the entire year. Oh--and only 15% of the U.S. population had access to Email, in any form, in 1996.
This U.N. economist pulled a cockamamy number completely out of thin air, and everybody has bought it. The U.N. bought it; Oxford University Press (who actually published the report) bought it; Wired magazine bought it. I fully expect that the mainstream Web media will buy it next, and sometime around the end of the week it will make the New York Times.
We don't need to sweat this. Instead, we should take up a collection to send this idiot to Math Camp for the summer.
Does the Third World want alms?
In the beginning, when aid was first suggested all the African leaders said no, we don't want alms, we want equal rights.
Rights to What?
Rights to sell their goods in any country without barriers. Rights to own their own resources and letting those who pay the most exploit them. Rights to the same information as any others.
Today we see the results of alms, people lining their own pockets, totally inadequate systems of distribution. The alms have prolonged the misery of the nations receiving it. They have even indebted them! Because not all 'help' is free, because much 'help' require deals which benefits the economy of the giver (i.e. buy this stuff from this company), because 'help' needs 'advisors' which come from the givers country.
It is in fact a system which is much akin to a company town (like those in the US of A). You get your money in company dollars which has to be spent in company stores. You can get tools to do the job, but they are paid via debts to the company, and you have to buy support from the company.
The worst ones are the local ones?
After all that is said and done, it is infact the dictators who where the worst. They imprisoned their people and spent their money, BUT with the blessing of the US, and the USSR. The Phillipines has been a loyal US supporter. Singapore could invade East Timor without protests from the US, because the US needed a deep strait for their subs. Different communist dictators have of course had their support from Moscow.
You have to step back, gang, take a look at the whole picture. See what makes the world economy tick, see what makes the world politic tick, and see why it's so damned wrong.
The Speedy Viking