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more on EU to tax e-mail, text messages?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 10:06:14 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: John Levine <johnl () iecc com> Date: May 30, 2006 12:37:35 AM EDT To: dave () farber net Cc: lauren () vortex com Subject: Re: [IP] more on EU to tax e-mail, text messages?
Taxing text/SMS messages may be somewhat practical, but trying to do the same with e-mail will open a Pandora's box of problems.
Agreed. Taxing SMS is easy since they're already metered (at least in Europe where they're charged to the sender.) Taxing email or any other per-message e-mail charge is fundamentally impratical because the cost of building the infrastructure to collect the charges would cost far more than the revenue to be collected. And as Lauren noted, since e-mail has no security at all, there'd be a vast array of scams to charge the tax other than the actual sender. I have a well-known white paper on e-postage on my web site at http://www.taugh.com that lays out the problems that doom e-postage in more detail. Regards,John Levine, johnl () iecc com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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