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UN Proposes Email Tax

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the interesting-ideas dept.

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.

2 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. THERE IS NO GLOBAL EMAIL TAX IN THE WORKS! by rshah · · Score: 5

    From: Seth Finkelstein
    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.

    ------------------------------------------------ --------------------- Seth Finkelstein Consulting Web Programmer sethf@mit.edu

  2. Um, Kids? Hasn't Anybody Checked the Math? by The+Ancient+Geek · · Score: 5

    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.