Mark D Lew wrote:
On Jan 11, 2005, at 4:51 PM, Owain Sutton wrote:
Who charges the tax? Email isn't based on agreements between national organisations in the way the postal system is. Either you create a separate national email system, or you find a way of implementing such a tax everywhere from the Cayman Islands to mafia-ridden ex-Soviet states.
Yes, that's the problem. I'm just saying that if we can figure out a way to implement it effectively, that would be a good thing.
Even if we come up with a working tax applied only on ISPs registered in participating nations, isn't that an improvement? It means that (1) the tax-evading spammers are obliged to go to an extra effort to be registered offshore, and (2) spam-filtering systems can then get to work on offering an option to reject all emails from ISPs in the Cayman Islands etc.
mdl
That's a bit of a pipe-dream, isn't it? If hackers can spoof my e-mail address so it appears to come from New Hampshire, why do you think they would be able to block e-mail from a specific country? All they would have to do is to spoof everything (it won't be long before that happens, even if hasn't already) in the headers.
A charge on e-mails won't stop the spam -- the USPS keeps charging people for mailing junk mail, and it hasn't stemmed the tide of garbage that gets into my mailbox. The spam will merely change shape, where there will be monolithic spam operations in legitimate countries, paying the fee, which they will develop enough political clout to put a cap on the e-mail payments, so the spam-centers will pay a large amount, but on a per-message basis, it will end up being so cheap as to do nothing except to make some millionaires out of a few enterprising spammers who work around the charges.
And it will cost all the rest of us and then lead to other internet taxes once governments see all the income generated by your innocuous e-mail tax.
Face it, folks, junk mail, pesky phone calls, spam, are a part of life, live with however you want, with a white-list service, with 57 different e-mail addresses, whatever you want, but tread lightly when you start willingly offer to pay a tax.
Remember the US income tax, originally at something like 3%, which wasn't written into the Constitutional amendment only because everybody agreed back then that nobody would ever need to raise it above that. It seemed so unlikely as to be impossible, and now look at it!
I'd rather receive 500 FREE spams each day and keep e-mail free, than to pay an initial tax of $7 as someone suggested. Because I know that in another few years it will be $70, then $700 and then the internet will become the haven of only the wealthy and the whole benefit of the instantaneous, free interchange of information will be gone in a flash and we'll be stuck with just another income-producer for bloated worthless governments to suck dry.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
