E-mail Tax As Way Of Preventing Spam 592
scubacuda writes "This FT article criticizes current attempts to regulate spam. Re: Lessig's bounty-on-spammer proposal: 'This is a terrible idea that will make millionaires of two classes of people: reprobates who illegally maraud through others' hard drives; and those who have built their expertise about spam by peddling it, 'He considers the recent FTC spam conference "barking up the wrong tree," and thinks that the simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax: 'This requires smashing some myths....But, very soon, the Internet should turn into a penny post, with a levy of 1 cent per letter. This would cost the average e-mailer about $10 a year. Small companies would pay bills in the hundreds of dollars; very large ones in the thousands. And spammers would be driven to honest employment. The tax could be made progressive by exempting, say, those who sent fewer than 5,000 letters a year. The proceeds could go to maintain and expand bandwidth.'"
Is taxation best? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is taxation best? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is taxation best? (Score:4, Insightful)
" It wouldn't. But the government could finally cash in on the internet. Its all in our best interests of course."
Um, which government? As much as I will argue against the notion of the Internet as a lawless environment, the bottom line is that it is without borders, and spammers will easily be able to find an offshore haven from which to send their sexual enhancement ads. To assume that a US or UK law charging a per e-mail tax will somehow eliminate spam is unrealistic and unworkable. It will also significantly reduce the incentive to use e-mail for appropriate means, such as operating an e-mail discussion list.
Professor Jonathan I. Ezor
Director, Touro Institute for Business, Law and Technology
jezor@tourolaw.edu [mailto]
Swallowing the spider to catch the fly... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is taxation best? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also introduces billing issues (Score:3, Interesting)
We provide an e-recruitment system which emails a company's jobs out to matching job seekers each night.
The number of emails that gets sent out depends on how many new jobs there are and how many job seekers match them. So this sort of tax would be a variable cost that we would have no way to predict.
Of course we could (and would) pass it on to our customers. No problem there. Except that many customers are utterly
Re:Is taxation best? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is needed is a new protocol and this has already been talked about. If I knew more about who was developing it I wouldn't mind donating.
Re:Is taxation best? (Score:3, Interesting)
Dude the government could lose money selling drugs. There is no way this $.01 per email is going to be a cash cow, probably cost us (ie. USA tax payers) $.10 per email to collect that $.01 tax.
Re:Is taxation best? (Score:3, Informative)
The fee will start out small at a penny, but the cost *will* go up. Just like every other service ever thought up by the U.S. government. Eventually will be paying per MB for email like we do with snail mail.
Well I guess if this happens, people will start
Wrong and overly simplistic solution to spam. (Score:3, Insightful)
What in the world does the government have to do with bits being sent from one computer to another, and why should the government automatically get money for it without my consent? What if the machines were all within an intranet wholly owned by me? Of course the risk of spam would be much less, but try to see the point b
Historical First. (Score:5, Informative)
Not with false headers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not with false headers (Score:3, Interesting)
If the e-stamp was invalid, the recipient's program could either just throw the message away, or forward it to the tax authoritie
Re:Not with false headers (Score:5, Insightful)
We already have this. It's called a PGP signature.
The cost is a couple CPU cycles. Per email. Non-reusable, quick, easy and efficient. If everybody would start using PGP (which IMHO is a hell of a lot more likely than everybody switching to an "email-tax compatible" state-mandated commercial email client), we wouldn't have a spam problem any more.
Spammers just can't afford to sign their mails - with any signature. It's too expensive in CPU cycles. And note that the point here is NOT to validate the sender, it's just to validate that the sender had to burn a couple CPU cycles (which takes maybe a second on a 500MHz computer, for each email) to send it.
Manifestly untrue. (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam is one email being sent out a million times. Identical copies of messages flood a network. (If you don't believe this, I'll show you a spam I recently received which had over a thousand entries in the CC field. The spammer accidentally CCd instead of BCCd.)
If you're sending a million copies of one message, you only need one PGP signature. It becomes a fixed one-time fee per different email you send out, not a per-message CPU tax.
Re:Manifestly untrue. (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it for five minutes. You'll come up with half-a-dozen methods which don't involve subverting an IETF standard.
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Free hint: require a mailer field, X-SHA1-Hash, which is a 20-byte hash of (a) the message, (b) the timestamp, (c) the sender, (d) the original mailserver, and (e) the receiver. Anything which doesn't have an accurate X-SHA1-Hash gets discarded at the destination MTA. Presto. You achieve your CPU tax, but you don't subvert an IETF standard in order to do it.
I leave finding all the flaws in the above idea as an exercise for the reader.
Re:Not with false headers (Score:5, Informative)
I'd go for it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'd go for it (Score:2)
Me too... The tax would accelerate the development of a mail transfer protocol that does not lend itself to spamming. There are many solutions out there... none of them will ever be used because everyone is so lazy.
Why don't they just ban SMTP? It would probably be cheaper.
Re:I'd go for it (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead tax unsolicited commercial e-mail. Write a clear definition in the law of exactly what UCE is. Be sure to include any commercial e-mail sent to addresses on a list that was purchased, rented or leased.
Why bother everyone else with the administrative overhead of keeping track of how many e-mails they send? Just bother the spammers.
Require all spam to include a special message header with their spam-license in it. E-mail software or end users could che
Think outside the box. (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea of taxing email, or having a government sender verification site, contains the assumtion that the internet is somehow contained in a single country. When a Pakistani is sending an email to a Turk, who's government website is the Turk supposed to check? What is the tax to be paid in? What happens with a country that decides that it will not comply, how do you check the key?
Spam is an international problem. It cannot be fixed by a national solution. Legislation will not work, because there will always be countries which do not comply. If there is going to be a solution to spam, it is going to be a technical solution, not a legal one.
straight jacked (Score:2)
For someone like him, this would royally suck. And as much as it sucks to be spammed by my good friend Oafy, Oafy is still a friend, and his spam isn't advertisements for hot sexy teens to suck and fuck my cock.
Effective, yes.
Good, no.
Plus, what are they going to do next? Tax pings? Times you initiate connections over port 6667?
M
it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, people hate paying for what they used to get for free, but if the price is reasonable then there's no reason not to accept it.
Note that I said reasonable price. In many cases where charges are introduced, the people running the system usually manage to turn this into a money-making exercise before too long.
Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:4, Insightful)
That's okay, the democrats say only the rich pay income taxes or benefit from tax cuts, so you're OBVIOUSLY rich... =)
I assume you've written your representative and asked them to support HR25, the Fair Tax Bill of 2003?
And that you vote Libertarian?
Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:4, Informative)
Paved transportation infrastructure should be paid for in gasoline and other transportation related taxes
It is. Much in the same way that bridge tolls go mainly towards their mainteinance (or at least it's supposed to). Last I heard, the Clinton administration raised the Gasoline tax here to an all-time high of 18.4 cents per gallon. (I am not sure if the current administration raised it since, but you can pretty much guess that it hasn't gone down!)
Now, whether or not that tax goes to maintaining roads and other traffic infastructures is a good point. It should, but probably doesn't.
Three decades of declining education proves that the more money you throw at it, the worse it gets
I wouldn't be so quick to make such a direct correlation, but the overall sentament is true. Personally, I feel the decline of the education system is due to the population growing faster than the supply of qualified teachers. Money is certaintly one thing that would be required to fix this, but not the only thing.
I could rant about stupid teachers for pages, but to sum it up in a single analogy: I work as an engineering consultant (designing plumbing and HVAC for the architects)... a very large portion of our work has been school expansions and renovations, which inevitably requiers visiting the schools to record existing conditions.
When declaring that we're from the engineer's office (when checking in at the administration desk, or when someone asks what we're doing), it's not uncommon to hear someone make comment about what trains have to do with the work that was going on. (Try not to think about that too hard, it hurts after awhile)
Basically, I feel the problem with the education system is more related to lack of qualified teachers than it is with misappropriation/lack/excess of funds. Bad teachers make for poorly educated students, and poorly educated students grow up to (sometimes) be bad teachers.
Public libraries? Same thing. In fact, libraries would be better off if they weren't free.
See, that's soemthing I don't necessarily agree with. The whole point is that information is supposed to be available to anyone, not just those who can afford it (Note that I didn't use the word "free", clearly not all information can really be free, nor should be). Although the internet has the potential to draw a lot of interest away from physical libraries, it's never going to replace them.
Plus, if a library "goes out of business" jsut because there's not enough interest, what about future generations? It's not like a video store or pizza shop, which are a dime a dozen (around here at least) and can come and go overnight. A library is a big invenstment, and once it's gone it's very likely to stay gone.
There are other things that simply deserve to die - like the National Endowment for the Arts.
Again, I'm not sure I'd agree with such a generalization. I think we agree that the arts are an important part of society, and that it's worth preserving. Although I admit I'm not comfortable with the wholesale subsidizing of our culture just because it won't stay afloat on it's own, I do support tax money going towards it.
I don't think many people would complain about their taxes if they really got the feeling that they were getting something for their money. (Clearly, tax money is not being handled wisely, and that's a big problem.)
To borrow a phrase from you: the more money you throw at it (more taxes), the worse it gets (poor handling of tax revenue). New taxes solve nothing in the long run.
=Smidge=
Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:2)
Because it is the easy solution that reaps the largest power grab.
Re:it makes perfect sense - if you think about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at the direct mailers filling the land fills with credit card offers and other equally unneed things.
Their business model INCLUDES the mailing cost cost (less than what you can pay) and the print costs. The USPS helps them to get in business.
Last I heard 80% of all mailings was junk mail.
Now a tax to send email... The ISP gets a cut, so they can increase network bandwidth. We pay as users to increase network bandwidth. They SPAMERS would pay too, it is included in their costs.
So what do you get... The same model as the USPS.
Now that shows why a price per email is not going to stop anything.
mailing lists (Score:3, Insightful)
a really bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so maybe people signing up to a list would have to pay for the messages they receive... but now we're basically talking micropayments!
Danny.
In the words of George Harrison... (Score:5, Funny)
If you try to sit-sit I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk I'll tax your feet
Tax man
Honestly, folks, this is not an original attempt at problem solving here. This is the kind of thing that ordinary ninnies in the U.S. legislature think up.
Taxation (Score:5, Insightful)
But congress tried again in 1913 [civilwarstudies.org], and was a 1% tax on the top 1% wage earners (in 1913, those that earned $3k to $20k per year).
Fast forward to today, and take a look at how far we've let the government tax our earnings... today, the top 1% wage earners pay 38.6% [fairmark.com] of their salary in taxes, accounting for ~ 29% of the total (top 5% wage earners paid 50% [allegromedia.com] of all taxes in 1999)
Now we have people saying, "I don't mind paying $0.01 for my emails"... What restraint has the government ever shown that next year it'll be $0.02, then $0.05 (who'll miss a nickle?), a dime... And where the hell will all this money go? into improving the internet infrastructure? Nooo, that's a private business. The money and accountability will disappear, probably into Medicare, Social Security, and all the other social programs that government isn't supposed to be in.
Government control is not a road we want to walk down folks. Yes, control of communications through taxation. I can't understand why the crowd complains when little things are being taken away, and the same people just turn around and hand the big ones over willingly.
Mailing lists? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the biggest failing in this is that to tax email would require a massive change to the email infrastructure- just send all email through your government approved relay. Sure- they won't look at it... putting this on top of SMTP- I don't think it would work- what would be the incentive to use it (other than possibly spam free email)?
Chilling effect on public free forums. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, adding *tax* to our e-mail (most of our forums are based on mailing list traffic) would completely cut down on the ability for members to communicate freely. Tax on e-mail is a *BAD* idea.
There are plenty of effective ways to deal with the SPAM problem. Tax is not one of them. Tax is never a solution to any problem.
broken record (Score:3, Insightful)
Thousands of email lists such as those hosted on Sourceforge would be shut down by a plan like this one, as well as killing lists like the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which sends millions of messages a year.
Also gone would be the days of the open mailing list, where people can send a message to the list without being subscribed, as is common in the open source world.
In short, this proposal guarantees that the only people able to use legitimate email lists will be large companies with the budget to spam. I got an unsolicited email from Wachovia this morning, apparently since I had a First Union account, they turned on all the marketing "spam me" options in my profile when the two merged.
I don't see how this tax will deter these semi-legitimate corporate spammers.
Enforceable? (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly, what about businesses? We probably send at least a few hundred (non-spam) e-mails a day out to the public Internet where I work, we'd get hit pretty hard.
And lastly, this is just an other tax, another form of revenue generation. We don't NEED more taxes. I'm sick to death of the government sticking out its greedy little hand. Go AWAY! I already pay tax on everything I buy, every drop of gas I put in my car, every cigarette I smoke, every drop of alcohol I consume, and every dollar I make. I pay property taxes, and I pay a form of tax when I go to the state parks to camp. I pay a tax to license the car I drive, and to just have the privelege of being able to drive.
No, I'm sick of it. Put your greedy little hand back in your pocket and go away!
Re:Enforceable? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really. If you RTFA, then you'd know that the tax is only $.01/per e-mail sent. So that few hundred a day would cost your company a little over $1000 a year. If your business can't afford that, I'd say you're in some other hot water.
Not that I agree with all of this, I'm just trying to refute the statement that your company would be hit hard by the tax.
Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus? (Score:3, Insightful)
So what if you're infected by an e-mail virus that spams everyone in your address book? Should you be held liable and therefore pay for sending e-mail you didn't mean or want to send? Should you be held liable for security flaws in software you have no control over?
Yes, you (usually) have control over *which* e-mail client you use -- but there is no totally secure e-mail client. (Or do we expect everyone to use mutt or pine?)
This sounds like a simple idea, but to me the implications are a lot worse than receiving spams.
My counter-suggestion (pulled fresh outta my butt) would be e-mail quotas. Each account would have a quota of, say, 100 e-mails (or perhaps 100 SMTP SEND reqs) a day -- any more than that and you pay.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Re:Uhm...and what if you have an e-mail virus? (Score:2)
Read my lips (Score:2)
Bad idea (Score:2)
Bye-bye mailing lists.
Bye-bye opt-in lists (hey, believe it or not, there are some products I am interested in).
Bye-bye email notifications whenever anybody replies to one of your comments on slashdot.
Bye-bye a million other valid uses of bulk mailings.
Re:Bad idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Bye-bye free email services
Bye-bye anonymous email-services
Hell NO! (Score:2)
I host several mailing lists and several other individuals with personal email accounts. This is all in good fun and I make no money from it. They want me to now PAY?! FUCK THAT! How the fuck you gonna regulate it? If you start charging for emails you're gonna fucking make millionares of a lot of sick twisted
Enforcement (Score:2)
The beast gets a facelift (Score:2)
The game will change, but the results will be the same
No! (Score:5, Insightful)
And kill off every user group, listserv, church mailing list, etc, etc.
Why do *I* have to suffer to stop idiot spammers?
Go after THEM, not me. Somewhere in the spam is a contact number or address (he has to get his money somehow). Ignore the often false reply to: and use that instead.
A penny an email will only ensure that some poor grandma is going tot get hit with a huge bill, because her PC or acct got hijacked, and the spams went out under her name.
Proof-of-work (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh ? (Score:2)
Oh dear (Score:2)
Re:Oh dear (Score:2)
Relaying & trojan smtps (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally
Whitelists are the way to go for me.
Dumb Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, in order to properly implement a tax, we'd have to have already solved the spam problem, which would make the tax superfluous.
Bull! (Score:2)
No Internet Tax (Score:3, Insightful)
To put forward idea that we pay taxes on e-mail is to display your ignorance of how e-mail works. If I set up an e-mail server at my own expense, and send an e-mail through it to another server, set up at the recipients own expense, I fail to see where the government's services come into it. After running a few traceroutes to my most common e-mail destinations, all the hops belonged to corporations, not the government.
And those are just the techno-political reasons why taxes don't make sense. What about internation e-mails. I live/work in Canada, but a lot of our business is international (States, UK, etc).
I also don't think that the spam-killers-for-hire is a good idea either (difficult to regulate, and a good chance of a lot of innocent bystanders getting hurt.)
I personally like signed e-mails, and much stiffer penalties for spammers. This may seem like a soft solution, but laws end up being the last recourse. As many on Slashdot jump at pointing out, technological barriers are easily overcome, especially by a large group of determined people.
Enforcement (Score:2)
It won't be long now before people only accept mail
Article is lacking Technological Saavy (Score:5, Insightful)
As a second issue, how does the government tax foreign entities for email? And who do you tax, when spam is notoriously made difficult to trace?
And beyond that, I can imagine the dozens, if not thousands, of hackers, just waiting to have this sort of incentive to develop a better SMTP, one that solves many of the problems and loopholes that SMTP currently causes.
Also the article suggests that the federal government should be creating an Federal sales tax on internet purchases. Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought I already paid state tax. Atleast I do with any company that is doing business properly. This doesn't seem different than the old style catalog sales, where you order something out of state to avoid tax. I know Apple charges state tax in NY.
Really for a publication called the financial times, this is not a very financially sensible or reality based article. it seems to be written by someone whose only experience in the internet is reading about it.
Re:Article is lacking Technological Saavy (Score:3, Insightful)
More likely, they'd start sending really big Instant Messages.
And then, AIM's programmers would puff up it's features with things like "Buffer until recipient is online", to emulate the feel of old-fashioned email as much as possible, without actually meeting the legal definition and becoming taxable.
Spammers (Score:2)
Rus
Theoretically sound (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam is a natural result of an unregulated network. The reason the Internet is so interesting and creative is because it's unregulated. You have to take the rough with the smooth. Sure, get angry at the spammers, prosecute them even. But don't think about restricting freedoms just because it's convenient to do so: that's what DMCA is about, and the Patriot act, and all the dozens of other stupid "anti-terrorist" laws that countries around the world are implementing right now.
Give me freedom, or give me death. I'll take the spam.
Altenate suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that a scheme where there would be a law on marking every email advertisement with something like [Advertisement] in the subject would be much more efficient. That is easier to track, and draws a clear line between obeying the law and not.
Using a system like this most people would filter out the spam, and the spammers would find their activities unprofitable. There would still be offenders, but surely it is cheaper to go after them compared to a global email taxation system?
Impossible to effectively implement (Score:3, Insightful)
Open mail relays and forged message headers.
If you can't track the source, you can't bill them. So then who do you bill? The company with the open relay? Some would say that's a good way to promote good system administration, but remember that the bill imposed could easily put a company out of business and into bankruptcy. Sounds a little strong to me.
I still feel that we are better off not having a mandatory tax. Instead, set up third party message verification systems. Emailers can, for a fee, have their message ran through an intense one way hashing/encryption system to create a special "Registed Email" message header, which is then sent along with the original message to the intended recipient(s). Using this system is entirely optional, but read on for the benefits of using it at least once per recipient.
Upon reciept, the recieving email client will see the special header, check it's validity with the issuer, and place it in the user's inbox. If the message does not have the 'registed email' header, then the sender's name is checked against a list of known users. If the user is known (from having been manually entered or already recieved 1 registed email in the past, and not in the blocked senders list, the mail will again go into the users's inbox. All other mail is automatically placed in a folder of the user's choice. If that means the trash, fine.
There you go. Don't need to even care about open mail relays, because if you've never heard of them before, and they don't send registered email, you'll never see their penis enlarging message. I've thrown this idea out before, but I thought I'd see if I could get more feedback on it.
Keep the Feds out! (Score:2)
What AOL is doing IS the way. By seting a fairly decent criteria for restrictions then internally blocking the hell out of people. Granted, they could abuse it, but their customers wouldn't allow it to get out-of-hand, or go elsewhere; they're business people after all!
I still think there's a technical way to throttle spam. Maybe we need a "White" Hole List th
interesting. (Score:3, Insightful)
--> Extream, yes. Untrue, well do you really want to find out? Lets tax something you pay to use already. Lets tax something to solve a problem that should be addressed with the right kind of legislation. Lets tax, then pay the very people that are spamming us to find the other people that spam us. Better yet, lets give them special powers.... I really love the idea that a "tax" will fix the problem. It would be a tax on just the US to pay to controll something that is world wide and rest of the world and 99% of the US does not even want controlled.
"I have an idea, lets tax e-mail!!! - Bring it up now, then 3 years down the road make it happen. They will scream, piss, and moan now but when we bring it up again in 3 years it will not seem so extream because they heard it once already. Yea, don't forget to say it will kill spam, child porn, and Ben Ladin...."
worst. idea. ever. (Score:2, Funny)
Hrmmm won't work (Score:2)
Taxes have one prupose (Score:2, Insightful)
Has anyone ever been put off drining, smoking or driving because of taxes? How about earning money? Owning a large house? Selling goods and services? All of these things are taxed. They have very little effect in reducing demand.
Makes no sense (Score:2)
This is the stupidest Idea *EVER* (Score:2)
I gave up on Usenet years ago, and use mailing lists as a method of communication that can be somewhat trusted to be spam free.
What possible benefit can no-money groups who use mailing lists get from this?
The money that people pay for their connection already goes to paying for bandwidth. Getting the greasy government fingers into it to further tax it, would be dumb dumb dumb. Who ever heard of taxes going away?... I can just imagine it, 50 years from now
Another way to tax spammers (Score:3, Interesting)
Snail Mail (Score:2)
Not to mention the fact that all of the mailing lists I subscribe to would shut down.
Wait - how the hell do they know who I am? (Score:5, Insightful)
Old thinking that is going out of style (Score:2)
First the Toe... (Score:2)
Bet you don't know that the Federal income tax was once only supposed to affect the "wealthy." And was "voluntary."
Nuh-uh. Spam is bad, but it aint THAT bad.
Author doesn't know what he's talking about (Score:5, Interesting)
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The spam problem currently exists mainly because we can't track down spammers. Until you solve that, implementing an e-mail tax will never get off the ground.
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What about open relays? Of course its stupid and irresponsible to have one, but now you could now find yourself being taxed thousands of dollars for doing so?
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What about an worm/trojan sending out bulk e-mail? Punishing the victim is a great idea.
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How do you deal with mail across national boundaries? I wonder if he has thought about the world about the USA.
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What about mailing lists? How do you propose to tax them? They take up more bandwidth than a single e-mail but less than n individual emails. Defining all these would lead to such a messy overregulated internet that it will lose all trace of what it was like formerly.
This guy has no idea of the technicalities of the internet.Look at this statement:
Mythic, eh? Has this troll heard of usenet? This is just an anti-libertarian rant/flame from some disgruntled control freak. Ignore it and move on.email taxation (Score:2)
Just remember which of these two groups will have lobbyists representing them when these decisions are made.
Other than the evil of the bureaucrats altering the idea beyond recognition (FUBAR again), the idea has its merits.
Might be a Good Idea (Score:2)
All the E-Mail cli
another poorly thought out proposal (Score:3, Insightful)
in Vanuatu [vanuatu.net.vu]
The only thing that we can do that isn't a band aid or a un-enforcable law is look at how to rewrite the SMTP [ietf.org] protocol, right now it is far too easy (by design) to send email from anywhere to anywhere without any accountability. We need a system that allows for servers to positively identified (something similar to a secure cert, not that I want to hand more money to Verisign but...) Then its up to the individual admin to decide what to do with email from a un-certified server; accept it, rate limit it, tag it, or deny it. Now no one _wants_ to rewrite all of the MTA's in the world, but at least this gives a way for non-compliant servers to get mail processed until everyone has gotten their's updated.
Go for it! (Score:2)
Er, obvious flaws (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay-- so what is "email", then? (Score:5, Interesting)
My largest fear from this type of proposal comes from the potentially vague definition of "email" that might be created. What is email, exactly? Are we talking about only SMTP? If so, what about "Instant Messenger" spam? Maybe we should classify instant message protocols as email, too. What about USENET? Should we classify NNTP as email, as well? What about SMS spam? What about the "next big thing", whatever it turns out to be? Perhaps we should have taxes based on IP packets sen1! That would be about as sane... yeesh!
Think I'm making this up? I had one customer who was ranting to me about their LAN-based "email" not working (a year ago, mind you). Upon closer inspection, I found their "email system" to be "WinPopUp" running on each PC that they'd use to send pop-up messages to each other. That was their "email". Think of your own relationships-- you know at least one person who calls instant messenger systems "email" (much like those novices who confuse RAM and hard disk space and call them both "memory").
The Internet works because we all agree to abide by the same standards, and agree that ICANN is the authority for naming / numbering. This spirit of cooperation works because we all benefit-- not because some government legislated it so. If some idiotic "email tax" does get legislated in the U.S., we run the risk of making ourselves into "second class" Internet citizens, and creating the "United States Internet" and the "rest of the world's Internet".
Spam is a social problem being "enabled" by technology. It cannot be legislated away, because it breeds on human nature: the desire to have large returns from little work. Real answers are things like ubiquitous public-key infrastructure, signed email, reputation "credits" (or "karma", if you like), and accountability. The decentralized "web of trust" model of PGP combined with the "reputation credit" model of eBay is what I'm talking about. Imagine an email client program that categorizes incoming mail based on the "cred" accumulated by the sender in a decentralized, non-government controlled "reputation tracking" system.
Taxes and laws aren't going to solve the problem. They're going to stifle the real power the Internet has-- bringing people together and enhancing communication. Worse-- they risk making an "island" of any country who would enact such idiotic legislation.
How retarded (Score:5, Interesting)
"The simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax."
Perhaps this is true, but the simplest way is almost NEVER the best way. How are you going to define the differences between email and every other electronic message passing? Will the tax suddenly apply to IM's? then web pages? then internet phone calls? What happens 20 years from now when the technology is different? Will the tax stop? Hell no! Most likeley there will be a new tax code buried in every little packet so that the government can get even more money for nothing.
Why should the burden of the "fix" for this problem be shouldered mostly by the people that it is trying to "protect"? I don't want to pay my government for the privelage of doing something that was previously free. That does not solve anything! I want the people sending spam to pay ME!
This tax might sound innocent on its surface, but it only takes one little thing like this to make it seem acceptable to throw a tax on every digital transaction.
To all you dopes that think this is a good idea, think about the big picture. This point in time is not static. Technology is changing constantly. Spam will die when the time is right. For now we can just deal with it with the methods available to us. Do not let the government see the Internet as the latest frontier where they can profit by "saving us from ourselves".
Unintended consequence regarding computer security (Score:3, Insightful)
Enough about SPAM (Score:3, Insightful)
-josh
Destroy the global village to save it, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like the spammers are winning their guerrilla war, then. We're suggesting responding with disproportionate force in a way that puts the main burden on noncombatants -- always the sign you're about to lose something like this.
I mean, we'd be throwing a huge burden on a system that basically works in order to go after abusers who've already shown they're not going to give up in an arms race for their survival. Good thinking. It's not like spammers would try to, say, abuse other people's servers to send messages without an attributable (read: taxable) source on them. No way. They wouldn't think of that one, no precedent for that... Or were we creating a big new policing division of the U.S. Postal service to defend e-mail servers?
Seriously, how wrongheaded is this? Extremely. It'd be impossible to administer and track without seriously degrading the flexibility and increasing the cost of e-mail systems we have right now on the cheap. How many times has your address changed? Who's tracking your tax bill across all those? Etc. etc. etc. Classic blindered thinking -- a pet idea we should pat on the head and move past. (Exactly how does this tax get collected across borders? Person hasn't addressed the international nature of the internet. Person suggests a "progressive" version, flying in the face of 20-some years of U.S. taxation trends. And so on.)
Create a new medium, don't try to fix the old on (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that trying to get an old medium to conform to today's demands might be more expensive (taxes or no taxes) than to simply coming up with a new one. A well-designed (and I don't claim to have one) solution would take less time to implement and I think would be easier to manage.
I understand that SSL, encryption and such would not be music to Dept. of Homeland Security's ears, that they would much rather leave the burden and cost on us, but there would be some upsides from their vantage point, too -- there would be less traffic for them to sift through (though it would be more intensive to process it), and I'm sure they'd get their back-door tentacles into the architecture somehow.
I won't even get into arguments like "how do you tax someone who's out of your jurisdiction", or "how do you get thousands of sysadmins try to add SSL to sendmail/qmail/pick-your-MTA without breaking backward-compatibility" etc. Just like gopher and ftp have/are becoming things of the past, I think SMTP should too.
Viruses more harsh (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, that this tax thing may trigger to make more viruses to flood out mails from innocent computers.
I was once for the idea, but after a thought, no.
Pay-per-e-mail and whitelisting are the only ways (Score:3, Interesting)
Tax? No thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition, spammers would try to workaround those taxes, and possibly succeed, just like they forge the headers of spam they send today. As a result, legimate users would pay the tax and spammers would send the spam for free. Adding some heavy-weight bureaucracy to the problem (tax system) isn't the solution.
The idea in A Bounty on Spammers [cioinsight.com] article seems like a one possible way to go. It's not perfect because it doesn't get rid of the wasted bandwidth immediatly as it doesn't outlaw spam, only spam that isn't clearly marked as spam. I'm not entirely sure about the $10000 bounty the article suggests. I think it should be proportional to the number of spams sent -- say, $5 per spam sent. And make that $50 per spam sent if the spammer tried to forge headers! It would really hurt to send one million spams with forged headers unlike today.
Once we have [ADV:] in every spam we get, we can modify SMTP servers to return "555 Advertisements not allowed" if one tries to send a spam and save some wasted bandwidth.
Alternatively, once we get micropayments work, we can allow spammers to send spam that transfers some money to the reader once he reads the spam. Because sending spam doesn't cost anything, the spammer could choose to pay some small amount of money to get the receiver to read the spam.
Perhaps some poor guy could make a living reading spam?Good Idea in theory. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Whos job will it be to monitor all the e-mail traffic. The sender or the reciever.
2. Spammers use Open Relays or fine vulnerabilities in the persons system (thus able to send 1 message to a hundred users) or sending data threw a non smtp protocol. Thus avoiding the tax or minimizing it $.01 for a million messages. and the poor victim besides getting blacklisted has to pay $10,000 in taxes.
3. When being sent threw a foreign site. How do you collect taxes from them?
4. How do you enforce this?
It seems like a good idea in the perfect world but it is not. All this will end up doing is putting extra expense on the honest business man and individual. But most spammers are far from honest and would end up doing what they have been doing.
Unenforcable. (Score:3, Insightful)
I run my own server. Are they going to snoop my traffic to see how much email I send?
If so, I'll set up VPNs to the servers of people who I email regularly. Are they then going to demand to check my logs to ensure I'm paying the correct amount?
It's clear that economics morons who write crap like this have never read an SMTP RFC in their lifetime.
Snail-Mail Direct-Marketing Is SPAM (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, it might make it worse, as e-stamps would legitimize sending un-solicited commercial e-mail. You can hear the spammers now: "Hey, I paid my one cent, I can send anything I want!"
And, at the same, time *I* have to pay to send my non-commercial e-mail, paying into a government which really does nothing to provide internet connectivty. So, essentially, you are asking me to pay a price to supposedly prevent something to an entity which would provide me nothing in return. After all, would the ISP's not charge for an account if there were an e-mail tax? Heck no. If anything they would raise their prices because of the additional burden of accounting, accounting software, tax analysts and the like. That has me paying a DOUBLE premium for something I am not doing? Forget that!
good article on micropayments (Score:5, Informative)
The end of email (Score:3, Informative)
Adding an additional tax directly onto each email would pretty much kill the system.
People would cut back on its use to the bare minimum, as people do with paper mail now.
The US postal service keeps claiming they are loosing money, its not really that. The volume of internet mail is due to the near zero cost of each email, nothing more. If the cost was raised, the volume would go down. Pretty simple concept.
But I agree SOMETHING has to be done, as I'm sick and tired of paying to receive this crap every day. That includes popups too.. not just
Spam-email..
And don't tell me I'm not paying.. I pay for my power bill, my ISP, my bandwidth, my drive space, my time..
Unintended Consequences... (Score:3, Informative)
How could this work? (Score:3, Informative)
wrong answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Much of the spam that I get is from overseas asian countries. How do you collect tax from them?
Also what happens to people and companies that do telecommuting where many of their employess communicate using email? I have had conversations with some of the people that I work with through email and have exchanged 100+ email in a day on the same subject. While I would prefer them to come into the office, I know they like being able to work at home.
Taxing email is NOT the solution. People will end up paying tax on email they did not send.
The solution is to change the email protocol to include something like PGP signatures. Something that cannot be faked (real tought). Then I go to my ISP and let them know what sigs to allow when I set up my account. Then they ONLY allow email into their system that matches the signatures.
Well I admit spam is pretty bad and I have given up my inbox to the spamers. My new approach of using email filters is to move mail from people I know to another folder has worked much better. Now I just need mozilla to recognize case insensitive email addresses. 'Sender' 'is in my address book ' move to 'new folder' works really well. Then a quick glance at my inbox to see if there is anything from anyone I know. Then select all / delete....
Why not just limit it at the server? (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine what would happen if the most popular mail server applications (i.e. Sendmail, Postfix, Exchange, Groupwise, etc) simply all agreed to implement a throttle control into their code. Allow it to be configurable, where something like an email list can send as much as it needs (trusted accounts), but untrusted accounts are limited to maybe 100 or 200 emails an hour. Spammers work by sending emails in the thousands or millions, as fast as they can. Ignore the from: header since it can be forged ... track them by IP address. It would be very hard for someone to come up with a new IP address every couple hundred emails and re-establish the connection to the server from a time perspective.
I think eventually the spammers would have nowhere else to go; if a version of sendmail came out with this feature, I would install it in a second, even though I'm not an open relay. Legitimate users cause these problems too.
I would even go so far as to say the ISP's need to take some action here, if it's really such a problem for their precious bandwidth. Monitor the SMTP volume coming through their network - set limits. Test their client systems periodically for open relays, block or severely limit the ones who do not comply after giving them time to work it out. A lot of admins, sadly, simply do not know better, or are very lazy until prodded. Tell them their server won't pass traffic until the relay is closed and watch them comply real quick. If it's a signed user agreement, they can't do much about it.
I require this of my Co-Lo customers; if they have a server, I *require* them to keep it patched, email relays closed, etc. I do check from time to time, and it's in their agreement with me that I reserve the right to disable any access to their server I deem necessary to preserve the integrity of the rest of the network. Not a single one has complained about that, and in fact all were pleasantly surprised to see a provider take such a pro-active approach to service integrity. Is it more overhead for me? I have found that it may seem like it initially, however by enforcing this it is actually less work than dealing with constant cleanup. Think about it. It's a shift in the paradigm of "customer can do no wrong", to "customer sometimes just needs to be shown the way".
Just adding a throttle control to email servers... That's all it would take. Just getting providers to tell their customers to stop causing the problems, is all it would take. Doesn't this seem like a hell of a lot less work than taxing email or any of the other mess of solutions presented?
Can You Tax? (Score:3, Insightful)
To better illustrate... Take the cliche of "the information superhighway." Except it's not a state-, or even federal-, owned highway. It's a bunch of companies that built big roads on their private property. The companies owning the roads sometimes 'peer' with other companies' roads, allowing people to seamlessly move from one road to another. You can also buy a 'driveway,' or even a private street, from a company. (Representing your Internet connection.) The government doesn't own any of the roads.
Now the government wants to put tollbooths on the roads, and collect a toll from anyone driving on the roads. I really can't see how this idea can possibly be legal.
In addition, I've always felt that it's difficult to define the Internet. It's not too hard to say that when I'm posting to Slashdot, I'm using the Internet. But suppose I use an internal mail server to send mail to someone else using the same mailserver. It never leaves the internal LAN. Am I using the Internet?
Now suppose the mailserver is outside my firewall. Am I on the Internet? What if I have my routing messed up and it goes out the T1 and comes back in, going a single hop to my ISP. Am I using the Internet yet?
Suppose, as is actually the case, my mail server is several states away. If I send mail to someone else on it, am I subject to the tax? But it's a shared server; if I send mail to someone else who hosts there, but isn't related to my site, do I get taxed?
Suppose I VPN into the server. Although some of the data goes over the Internet, my e-mail program 'thinks' it's on the local LAN. Am I taxed?
And what if I own a small ISP with multiple data centers. If I send mail from my house to my local data center, which is sent over a WAN to another data center I / my company owns in another state, is it the Internet?
My goal isn't to name every possible way of getting mail from one place to another. Rather, I'm trying to illustrate the ambiguity of exactly when something's on the Internet versus a private network, when most of the Internet _is_ a private network. But even if exact conditions could be drawn, I still this is _horribly_ flawed because it's a private network. (ie, my "road" analogy)
In addition to the conceptual problems, it has a few serious flaws in practice as well. First, how will they know? Will every mailserver in the country start sending reports to the IRS on who is sending mail?
A second flaw is that e-mail isn't always e-mail, if that makes any sense. If I send mail from Hotmail, and you receive it at Yahoo, neither of us have directly used anything but HTTP. It's not my 'fault' that it got sent over SMTP.
And thirdly, I get a lot of mail that wouldn't be sent if it wasn't free. I'm on nearly a dozen mailing lists; is the mailserver going to be billed for every copy it sends out? Poor bugtraq! I also get mail anytime one of my comments here is replied to, or moderated. Countless other forums I visit do the same. I'm sure that none of these places would continue mailing helpful things like this if they had to pay.
Oh, and there's another little issue... It probably won't be too effective against the spammers. Since many of them already bounce mail through open relays, forging headers, they're probably not going to pay a cent. Sure, after getting a massive 'bill' for the mail the 'victim' might prohibit relaying on their server, but it's definitely not going to end open relays entirely. All it's going to do is destroy the Internet as we know it.
(BTW, after writing all this... Does anyone know if this idea is actually serious? I can't tell you how many e-mails I've received about how Congress is thinking of an e-mail tax to help the Post Office recoup lost money... Is it actually real now?)
Lessig isn't always so bright (Score:3, Insightful)
So, you've got something that should be illegal... spam. Rather than just making it explicitly illegal and dealing with law breakers, Lessig suggests that everyone pay a tax to solve the problem?
Screw that. I pay for my internet connection. If I want to send out 1 million legitimate (non-spam) email messages a year, I shouldn't have to bear any extra costs not already accounted for in the price of my connection.