Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Should the US Government Tax Email?
Contramac writes "I've been hearing lately that the government wants to place a tax on outgoing email because more people are writing email than postal mail. Should this or other taxes on the Internet take place? Should the Internet community enter politics and make a stand of how they feel? I'm sure there is or have been some legislature about this topic somewhere. Myself and maybe other people out there want to find out what others opinions about this matter are. What is yours? " This is something we are going to have to face sooner or later, but I don't see how the US Government can justify it. A large portion of this infrastructure is based on commercial resources, not governmental ones.
This is an insipid anti-government fantasy. Can you show me one shred of evicence that this idea is being seriously considered by anyone in Congress, or the Post Office, or anywhere else, for that matter? This would NEVER happen, EVER. Anyone who proposed this would make a laughingstock of themselves, and the idea would quickly be forgotten.
Last I heard, the US Postal Service was doing very well financially, and the cost of postage from the USPS is still much cheaper than the cost of other countries' postal services. Regular letter, 33 cents from anywhere in the US to anywhere else. Can't beat it.
Yet, I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there who are happy to believe this FUD, because some people are ready to believe abolutely anything negative you ever say about the government, regardless how completely wrong or unfounded it is. Our Congress is scary, but people who dream up these ridiculous scenarios are a lot scarier to me.
If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back downstairs into my concrete bunker, where the jack-booted government thugs won't be able to reach me. My killer robot dog biff, which runs Linux, will protect me from the IRS email-stamp stormtroopers. They'll have to pry my email client from my cold, dead fingers.
How exactly would the uberidiots in D.C. manage to track e-mail usage in the first place? The costs of monitoring traffic, let alone collecting the taxes, would probably exceed any potential revenues.
This is probably either a "mature" Internet hoax, or a stupid scheme dreamed up by bureaucrats worried about losing their gravy jobs. As a matter of fact, I can't see any reason for the USPS to exist outside of high volume, low speed junk mail delivery. What little business they haven't lost to e-mail and fax machines is divided up between Fedx and UPS. The Postal Service should be sold for scrap, and their functions should be farmed out to the lowest bidder.
slashdot broke my sig
to show that email can never replace snail mail
(If anything, email is replacing the telephone,
and we already see how the industry is fighting
that).
Bills - How the heck would this work? The bill is my receipt for services
rendered, and without the paper copy, I have
no prove that they provided me services, and
thus, I can ignore paying it
we're getting close to e-bill payments, but
until every American is wired, snail mail will
still exist.
Cards - I'm not necessarily
prompting the greeting card industry, but
the online greeting card sites will never replace
the cards you send out on holidays and for
the all important Mother's Day. (They may
suppliment these cards, but think of the heck you'd pay if you only sent an electronic card...
Magazines - Magazines will
never be ousted by online versions until you can
drag the computer into the bathroom or the
bus to work. A substancial bulk of snail mail
is for this.
Soliciatations - Nobody likes
spam, but surprising, snail mail marketing works
more than email marketing. Take a look at
how far Publishier's Clearinghouse got before
they were basically punched in the stomach.
Besides, I'd much rather get a soliciation in
the snail mail box, as that can be tosses with
no cost to me, as opposed to email spam that
may cost me online connection time.
Email and Snail Mail are two different worlds;
there's some overlap, but the two services work
simulataneously as opposed to competitively.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Alternately, web-based e-mail systems become more popular, and again, all the logs and auditing go completely to waste.
If it's logs of just traffic going through the ISP's SMTP relay, people learn to connect to open relays elsewhere on the net. I'm sure there are public relays around, still.
If it's byte-count that gets taxed, e-mail programs might suddenly sport GZIP or BZIP2, which wouldn't avoid the tax, but would severely reduce the money made. If everyone did that, the cost of collecting it might exceed the money made, which would kill the scheme very quickly.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
--
There IS no serious discussion about this. There is not and has never been. I'm shocked this would even be posted on here, thirty seconds of searching on the Internet turns up the fact that its a hoax. Its a version of the FCC modem tax hoax that also has been kicking around for over ten years.
l
Most of the e-mail forwards going around the Internet refer to Bill "602P" when they're talking about it.
The FCC actually put out a statement on it, the hoax had spread so far:
http://www.fcc.g ov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Factsheets/nominute.htm
I hope this will stop the waste on here even discussing it. Maybe Andover should hire someone to check up on these silly stories on here before getting people all worked up.
The originator of this hoax was a lawyer here in the U.S. known for starting these hoaxes, unfortunately pre-coffee I can't think of his name, although anyone curious could probably find it with a few minutes searching on dejanews.com
Did you know that it is illegal to use FedEx to send anything other than "time-critical" material or packages?
I kid you not. The government has fined many companies hundreds of thousands of dollars for using FedEx to send non-critical packages. The USPS has a government-imposed monopoly on low-priority letter delivery. Attempt to evade the monopoly, and you will be fined.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
There are so many points you could argue on this one, but they're all moot unless someone can explain what authority the government has to try to do this. This is like Microsoft coming into Real Networks and saying "Hey, we aren't making enough money for ourselves so we're going to start charging you everytime someone plays one of your media files with your Real Player."
Seriously, I can't even begin to understand how they can just move in on something and say "Oh, hey -- let's tax this". What's next, taxing me evertime I read a book? Even though they didn't publish it, shelve it, write it, read it, sell it, or anything else?
What if I use a SMTP server that is located outside of the country? What if I send an 'email' as a file via ICQ instead? How about Usenet? How about charging me evertime I download a post from there? How about charging me everytime I make my own post? Maybe even charging me for every data-packet transmitted while playing Quake or KingPin?
How about students? What if you send a personal email from work? How are they going to charge you? What if you don't have a credit card or checking account to pay from? How am I going to contact administrators regarding spammers who are hitting my accounts? What if you don't use an actual SMTP server directly and you use Hotmail or some other form of web-based email?
I send approximately 20 emails per day. That's 600 per month. The average message is around 3k. So I'm transfering less than 1.5MB's per month in email. If they charge me a penny per messag, I'm paying 6 bucks to send 1.5MB's of data?
What's next -- do they want to take over all of the email servers and have one central post-office run by the USPS? (The same people who fail to deliver some 20% of all letters!)
What about FEDEX? Do they want to start taxing me for using that service? Sure FEDEX is more reliable, friendlier, and professional, but it takes away from Uncle Sam's almighty dollar (seeing how Uncle Sam is becoming one big fat corporation).
---
seumas.com
I'd rather hand a letter to a stranger on the street and ask them to deliver it for me. It's just as likely to get there as with the USPS.
On another note, isn't the USPS actually a company? It's just like Amtrak, from what I understand. They are a business, but have the backing of the government to remain a monopoly on standard mail deliver. As such, how can the government back a business in levying a tax to support said monopolistic business for a service not even provided by them?
---
seumas.com
The problem with this is that most of the bandwidth I use is for things like Starcraft. I send a hell of a lot more data through my ISP for Starcraft than for email or other important uses. So if they taxed us based on traffic, I'd be forced to stop playing Starcraft. It would simply shift internet use from high-bandwidth uses to low-bandwidth ones, and would unnecessarily and artificially limit some uses.
Also, how would you define "ISP"? If I'm in a computer lab, and I do FTP between two different computers in the lab, is that internet traffic? How about if they are in different rooms? Different buildings on the same campus? The decentralized nature of the 'net would make it difficult to determine which transactions should be taxed. And unless they come up with a clear standard as to who has to meter usage, it would be relatively easy to fall through the cracks. The attempts to solve this kind of problem would do a lot of damage to the net, and would result in stagnation and rising costs. This is a very bad idea.
I doubt this would ever come into effect, and if it did, there would be no way to impose it. People would just turn to ICQ or AOL or the millions of other messaging tools. Second of all, it would take millions of dollars to implement a software system capable of tracking those emails. Also, Im SURE there would be many ways around it. I agree with the others who say this is just a paranoid rumor.
---------------------------
---------------------------
The last I read about this (which I admit is early 1997), the exact opposite is true, which is that 1st Class and priority mail essentially subsidize the delivery of bulk e-mail (or at least the junk mail end of things), with other bulk rate mailings for business (zip sorted, 500 piece or larger) somewhere around the breakeven point.
Anyway, I don't want to get in a pissing match about statistics, but am wondering if you could point me to your sources of information so that I can update my knowledge base.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
This whole thing is a HOAX, there is no truth to this. First, The Postal service is a separate business, it receives no money from the government. ALL of its revenue comes from the sale of postage. This hoax is more anti government right wing bullshit.
- ---
Us postal workers bust their butts everyday. The lazy government worker is a thing of the past. My route is 10 miles long. I have to fight off the pitbulls, crack dealers, and drunks all day so you can get your Linux Journal.
Anyway, the post office is making a profit, they have embraced Linux, and QNX to run their OCR's. They do use NT for non essential uses. the supervisors have W98 at their desks. That keeps them busy and confused, and out of the carriers hair. Notice the number of killings at the post offices have fallen? The supervisors are so busy trying to keep their Wintel boxes running they don't have time to harrass the workers.
I am a mail carrier and LinuxPPC user. And so far, I have turned two fellow workers to the Mac and one to Linux, and one has gotten the hots for Free BDS.
-----------------------------------------------
Fight mediocracy, don't use Microsoft products.
photosMy Photostream
It's one thing that the government makes us pay postage to deliver paper mail, as that is paying for a service rendered.
Likewise, when I use the telephone, I pay the phone company to be able to use the service of the telephone line. This is taxed by both the federal and state government.
When I by a pen, I pay a sales tax to purchase the pen. The paper that I write I paid sales tax on also.
Do I need to pay an additional tax because I happen to write on that paper with a pen??? Or do I pay an additional tax because I happen to sing on the phone instead of 'talk' on the phone.
The question is, do I have to pay a tax on something that I've already paid a tax on the first place, that being the phone line. Is double taxation fair?
What's the difference between me singing, using Spanish, or using audio packets??
Are we smart enough to see this as an insult to our sense of freedom??? Are we angry enough to value our vote??? Are we persistent enough as a group to take the trouble and time to elect people to represent us and our views to office???
i realize fully that this is a complete hoax, but if it were planned, is it technically possible?
aside from the "honor system", this seems impossible.
how can the US govt tell which packets are eMail without wiretapping every single section if the inet backbone? they can't
they could, in theory, install software on every single mailserver in the US that maintained a count of every person's eMail activities, but how would they enforce that that software stay running? they couldn't
what about anonymous mailers? if i don't like someone, i can just run up a $100 bill on their eMail tax real quickly..
what would a tax like this do to "free" eMail services? would you have to submit a tax form every time you signed up for one?
i can imagine the list would go on and on..
i just don't see how the internet can be taxed for anything other than e-Commerce and an additional tax on ISP bills.
just my 2
-fred
On the post office's website a week or two ago, they had a press release denying any rumors in a chain email or something that said the exact same thing. this doesn't necessarily mean anything, buti remember it specifically saying that the post office would not support such an idea.
Generally, the post-office is a lot more than just a mail delivery center though; you get yr passport there can register to vote, and a lot of other government services use the Post office as their outlet.
In addition, though the web has been the hottest topic o' the century (well, except if you lived before the second half of this decade..then it was OJ, then the Moon, then JFK, then Charles lindbergh....) email doesn't have the legal status, nor the widespread use of good ole paper. Plus, email doesn't have a home base like paper mail would. What about international eMail, etc.?
This all assumes there'd be a way to track it, and so far, echelon hasn't been admitted to here in the states. Since the internet is composed of a million different servers from different secotrs of the economy, public and private, it'd be hard to track eMail, let alone pick out its originator, unless the ISP got involved, or servers were tracked...anyways, the more this is thought about, the more it becomes another internet rumor...or some stupid politicians...
chimchim
Spoon!
OK, since this is being passed off as a legitimate topic, can someone please link to a legitimate site that mentions such a plan. I got an e-mail a week or so ago along these same lines involving the US Postal Service, then searched google and found the SAME letter, except it involved the Canadian Post. The politician's name was even the same, though the Canadian letter called him a Montreal politician, and the US letter called him a Washington politician.
It's just a chain-e-mail hoax.
*Happy Days* are here again!
-M
but not in the way you think. Its not the US it
was the UN a little bit ago. Some bureucrats without anything else to do wrote up a little paper on how a penny an email would solve world hunger or some other BS. It's nothing more than a way for the UN to stuff its pockets imho.
If this was seriously proposed in congress I'm sure they'd just add a percentage tax to net access like they do to cigs and booze regardless of how much email your little fingers can type out.
At the risk of coming to this party very late, I work in the government, in a position to know about these things, and there is NO, absolutely NO PLAN, NO thought, NO inkling, NO notion, NO consideration, NO conception, and NO whim to place any tax of any kind on e-mail. Ever. Period.
This UN plan was real, but as it turns out, they had heard the USPS was considering it, and that's where they got the idea. As the UN doesn't actually have any taxing authority, this was pretty amusing anyway.
Please file this away as one of the many internet myths that we shouldn't waste our time on. There are many more important issues like gov't encryption controls, the FBI restricting the growth of technology because of security fears (they have a lot of friends up here) and Scientologists attacking web-speech.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...
We need a 3rd Internet. Internet 2 will be for research institutions, and so forth. Internet 3 will be for people who don't have their heads up their... er computer enthusiasts who don't want to put up with all of the other bull... It just seems like a good idea.
But, there is a legitimate possibility of a tax being levied on the Internet and that is a sales tax. Senator Fritz Hollings has introduced legislation that would levy a national sales tax of 5 percent on every interstate sale. While this covers mail-order catalogs and telephone sales, there is no doubt that its main focus is e-commerce.
You can read the text of the bill here.
The bill would take the money generated by the national tax and fund grants to pay teachers' salaries. It flies in the face of Rep. Chris Cox's Internet Tax Freedon Act, which called for a three-year moritorium on taxation of the Internet.
A side note
While nobody likes new taxes, they may eventually be neccessary. The primary beneficiary of sales taxes are state and local governments, not the big, bad feds everyone loves to hate. Sales taxes represent more than 36 percent of the budget of state and local governments.
That pays for things like schools, police and firefighters. We have to have those services. If the economy moves more and more to the e-commerce model, local governments will either tax this new economy or die.
But, that being said, I think we are a while off before taxation becomes neccessary. While e-commerce is growing at an incredible rate, it is still a small part of the total economy, and we don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
We do not have an absolute right to a tax-free Internet. Intellectual freedom? Yes. Academic freedom? Yes. Freedom from taxation? It is up to us to look at the situation and use our heads. No one likes new taxes, but we all like things like roads, schools and the ability to walk on the streets late at night.
HipNerd
Hipnerd
the staff at slashdot needs to get some more weekend news-adder people because i check this web page every 5-30 min, when i'm online and there is no new content, and i cry for a little and then go back to surfing the web.
SuPz.orG
Would the tax be on the sender or the receiver? If the sender, how could you do that? E-mail just works through the SMTP protocol, which is trivial. Any Linux user probably has an SMTP server on their machine, and any who don't can spoof it with telnet.
If the receiver, I can see the anti-spam groups being up in arms about that one. Can you imagine being taxed, by the Government, for receiving a get-rich-quick mail??? IMHO, that just won't fly with anyone.
Free e-mail servers may move off-shore, if taxes are imposed, and there is NOTHING that can be done to stop them.
If the tax is on bytes sent, compress your e-mail and pay less tax for exactly the same message. If it would cost more to collect than they'd get, anyway, this would massively inflate the difference.
What could anyone do to monitor e-mail? Scan port 25? So, have your mail server also use port 1025! Or some other "unofficial" port. So long as your friends know what port you use, they can patch their sendmail, qmail or zmailer to use it, and you can trade untaxed e-mails to your heart's content.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
--
This hoax has been circulating for at least
2 1/2 - 3 months. I would expect slashdot
to do at least _minimal_ screening for this
type of thing.
Next thing you know, we'll be seeing warnings
for the Good Times virus in AskSlashdot.
Anyone who hears any of this "I heard that
blah blah blah computer blah blah government
blah blah virus blah blah cyberwar" crap
should check out these sites before they
pass this stuff on:
Computer Virus Myths home page:
http://kumite.com/myths/
(has info on this email BS too)
Hoax du Jour
http://korova.com/virus/hoax.htm
The Crypt Newsletter
http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/
These three sources alone are enough to disprove
almost all of the computer related "mass-hysteria"
type of misinformation which pervades all levels
of media from the net, all the way to newsprint
and TV.
Please think before you spew out the latest rumor.
Especially if you are a "news website."
-- Bret
Big Business is a much bigger threat than the government. You can vote the government out, You can't vote Bill Gates out.
Baloney. Bill Gates does not have an guarunteed income of 2 trillion dollars a year whether his "customers" like it or not. Bill Gates cannot write laws. He cannot throw people in jail.
In some cases businesses do these things, but always with the help of the government. If the government weren't so big, it wouldn't have so many favors to give out to businesses. So it remains true that only the government can pose a real threat to our freedom. Corporations cannot coerce you without government help.
I can't believe that old scam came up on _Slashdot_... I saw it a while ago on the Mitnick mailing list, but there it was quickly battered down. Please understand that this would not be possible, and I even think there are official statements claiming that they do not want anything like that.
Putting tax on E-mail would be like charging people for speaking...
ObTopic:
This makes no sense at all. While (I think) the post office may be running a slight surplus at the moment, it has not been a substantial source of government revenue in this century. In any event, the cost of delivering first class letters sent by ordinary joes/janes is substantially subsidized by bulk rate mail, so to the extent people send e-mail instead of first class postal mail, the government is actually farther ahead by a few pennies.Suggested substitute topic: In order to make Area 51 even more secret, the government is considering deleting the number 51 from the official list of positive integers. Discuss among yourselves.
I wish I could be that naive.
The other reason may be "We want to track all this email". This would be a great way to keep tabs on things. It would also be a way to shut down operations that wish to hide their doings from the government (not necessarily criminals...I can think of many legitimate reasons to hide certain details from the government). If you avoided notifying the Fed of your emailing, the IRS can get you, a la Al Capone.
BTW, is this not a direct assault on the first amendment? Free speech requires "free beer". If the government has the power to tax email, it has the power to tax it heavily--that is, to suppress it.
You can tax commerce, so you can tax commercial communications ventures (telcos, ISPs, cable providers) for their commercial activities. You can tax and regulate the electromagnetic spectrum as a "previously undiscovered resource", and the only way to keep the spectrum from becoming pure noise. Finally, you can tax postal service (with stamps) because the government is actually providing a service.
Taxing email (or other TCP-style traffic) is entirely out of line. It will also be very hard to do; if a protocol is taxed, another protocol will pop up. Programmers can release software faster than Congress can regulate it. Most ISPs are already taxed on a per-dollar, rather than per-megabyte, basis by virtue of being commercial entities.
I can understand why the government wants to tax the Internet. It's for the same reason bank robbers rob banks: it's where the money is. The Internet is full of the more wealthy people and businesses in the US; if you are going to levy a tax in this country, you may as well tax the wealthier people. I for one have no problem with taxing the Net in principle, but I do have a problem with the email idea. Perhaps a saner, more fair, and less invasive tax would be an e-commerce sales tax.
Before people flame me for saying the above to get "other people" taxed, understand that I am a software engineer (to give you an idea of my tax bracket) in the e-commerce business. If my ideas get implemented, I will pay more tax than I do now. I don't overly mind paying taxes, and I know that being taxed in some form or other is a necessity. I do mind when the tax codes invade my freedom and violate my rights, especially when the same tax revenues could be gained in a less invasive way.
--The basis of all love is respect
I do not support the taxing of email . . . just wanted to get that out of the way.
Onto my real point. How would they do that? Would ISPs be required to log all of the email messages that people send? This alone would be a huge task to put to ISPs that would cost them money. Second would be the issue of logging such emails from the standpoint of privacy.
How would the taxes be collected? Would it be added on to the bill you pay your ISP, would it be put on your W2? What if your ISP was not your email provider (free email abounds)?
Needless to say, I think that it would cost twice as much to manage the thing as it would gain in revenue.
The other question that comes to mind is what about all of us who run Linux and Sendmail? I run my own sendmail and IMAP server on a dedicated connection. I am about to give a couple of friends account because they are moving. Would I be required to log the number of email that left my box (something I really don't know how or want to do), and then collect the money from them and me (something that I WON'T do).
This is a really bad idea IMHO. If someone would explain the logistics behind such a proposal, at least it could be debatable from an ethical/political standpoint as to whether or not it would be beneficial, but without any such logistics worked out, it's nothing . . .
The USPS has neither the resources nor the jurisdiction to do this; it's just another in a long string of chain e-mails that morons forward around without knowing anything about it.
In general, Internet taxes won't work. There are only two real models that could work: charge the ISPs a tax, which they would pass on to subscribers (I imagine AOL and others would fight this tooth and nail), or a national sales tax on purchases made over the Internet. Taxing things such as e-mail or bandwidth would be impractical.
That won't stop legislators from trying, though...