On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Bryan Williams wrote:
> Be careful here. The Postal authorities, notably the Postmaster General,
> has been making noises about his "lost revenue" due to electronic mail and
> overnight services. The post office will be in the red this year - the
> first year in about 9 years of in-the-black operations. Various UN/WTO
> people have also made noise about customs duties lost by software
> downloads via internet. While this may be a hoax, that there are some
> government agencies that are studying the issue is not a hoax.
I disagree: while they may try to tax, for example, purchases made over
the web, e-mail surcharges would be
a) an amazingly spectacular way to kill one's political career, and
b) impossible to enforce without amazing intrusion of privacy.
And even if they decided to intrude on privacy, it would be... be...
well, for those of you who truly understand POP and HTTP and SMTP and
TCP/IP and UUCP and so on, you can only imagine how difficult it would be
to set up the e-mail equivilent of, say, a water meter. And how much joy
the Open Source community would take in subverting same. It just ain't
gonna happen.
$.02
-Ken
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
**********************************************************
