FC: Financial Times commentary: It's time to tax all email!

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

[Anyone remember that UN report talking about an email tax -- a 
thinly-disguised wealth transfer to African governments? --Declan]

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Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 23:53:51 -0700
To: declan@well.com
From: "Roger E. Rustad, Jr."
Subject: FT editorial: taxing e-mail in the hopes of canning spam

An editorial that might interest Politech subscribers:

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1051389718756

Christopher Caldwell 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:

"The simplest way to regulate spam is through a tax. This requires smashing 
some myths. A decade ago, Americans were gulled by politicians of both 
parties into believing that taxing the internet exceeded the government's 
capability. When that proved to be manifestly untrue, they were told that a 
tax would be an affront to some mythic libertarian "spirit of the 
internet". The tax moratorium on internet sales has always been supremely 
unfair, offering, say, Amazon a de facto subsidy against taxpaying local 
bookstores.

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."

(If you fwd to the list, please remove my e-mail)

Thx,
Roger
contributing editor
GrepLaw.org




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