EU May Tax SMS and E-Mail Messages

[Alpha_toxic]

Read here (http://news.com.com/EU+to+tax+e-mail,+text+messages/2100-1028_3-6077464.html) and here (http://www.betanews.com/article/EU_May_Tax_SMS_EMail_Messages/1148675455)

Now, I know that 99.99% this is NOT going to happen, but it still sounds scary in some way... Though there is no way this can technicaly be implemented, there are just too many ways to fool the system.

On the other hand, in some way, it sounds atractive, as this may be used to reduce the spam floating around and this is going to result in overall internet speed increase (spam is more than 50% of the data transfered worldwide...).

I wonder what you people think about that?

[SeanTater]

Um - Hum -- not going to happen; but look:

We already have problems figuring out where spam is coming from -- spammers would not be taxed.
Viruses -- people would suddenly be paying boo-koo bundles of money because so-in-so's virus sent 1/2 billion e-mails this week
Identity theft: whatever they use to figure out how to divide who gets billed how much -- will eventually be cracked and even though <foo> has not turned on his computer in a year, he's paying out the teeth for e-mail he did not send..

[BWF89]

Paying to send real mail is nessessary because the people at the post office need to get paid for their work. Taxing a piece of electronic data that could be duplicated and emailed a million times for no more than the price of the electricity of the computer that is powered up to write is nonsense.

[G Morgan]

Paying to send real mail is nessessary because the people at the post office need to get paid for their work. Taxing a piece of electronic data that could be duplicated and emailed a million times for no more than the price of the electricity of the computer that is powered up to write is nonsense.

You don't pay tax on Postal though (at least not in Britain) you pay per service used via stamps. E-Mail as far as I'm concerned is covered in the fee to the ISP. If you want to employ a tax it would have to be there but that wouldn't stop spam. The best way would be to IP ban any machine which has been zombified. Then when people complain they can be told why and then pointed towards the solution (Ubuntu of course).

Personally I think tax raising powers need to be taken away from the EU. The situation where a minor percentage of the population (in farmers, 2% I think at the last check) receives 40% of the EU's tax money (or €440,000,000,000 in absolute figures, yep 440 billion) when the European economy is stagnant shows just how far from reality the leaders in Brussels are. Then again kudos for standing up to the redmond monster.