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Minnesota Senator Says Email Tax Might Reduce Spam
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Nov 19, 2003 09:21 AM
from the that's-not-all-it-would-reduce dept.
from the that's-not-all-it-would-reduce dept.
indros13 writes "The Hon. Mark Dayton, Senator from Minnesota, is reportedly considering a "miniscule email tax" to counter the flood of spam. Thinking like an economist, he's obviously hoping to make mass emailing unprofitable. 'You can't say, "We want it to be totally free and unrestricted and on the other hand we want it to work smoothly and civilly," he said.' No word on how all those lobbying groups that use mass emails will respond, but I'm sure there are a few emails on the way..." Politician weasel words are part of the package, though; Dayton says a tax is "just one of the tactics that should be considered, but I don't favor it at this time."
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Government control = bad (Score:5, Insightful)
"Leave it alone," [Norquist] said. "If the government gets involved, they will mess it up."
Agreed. The point is that if "little" things like this are allow, then it's basically saying "Look, Verisign, commercializing the internet is the solution like you said!"
I likes my SpamAssassin, thanks
Re:Government control = bad (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly it should go to a once-a-year ice cream party for the whole Internet.
Parent
Re:Government control = bad (Score:3, Funny)
Shhh... then they'll impose a tax on ice cream parties!!
Re:Government control = bad (Score:3, Funny)
Sure, go clodbashing, you bigot.
Hey, if you were on as many painkillers as I am, you'd be laughing too.
Re:He could get this right... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Federal Government should stay out of it. With or without a tax, a new law would cost money. You'd need enforcement to ensure that the tax is paid (or, in your example, the Bayesian filter is installed), etc . .
In the end, the Feds would bungle every aspect of any attempted law (except maybe collecting the tax -- they're good at that).
Parent
Good intentions, bad implimentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Good intentions, bad implimentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, how in the name of the gods do you implement such a tax?
Do you tax intra-company email as well?
Do you tax email between different geographical branches of the same company?
What about instant messages? efax? VoIP?
Suppose people work around it by creating VPNs and just tunnel their email to members of the VPN by encrypted means.
Suppose you do file transfers rather than email--just have programs at each end that compile and de-compile the files into text messages, but while in transit they don't resemble email.
Methinks this whole idea is looney and it will take about a week for people to develop workarounds to completely avoid an "email tax". Leave it to a Member of Congress to destroy yet another productive sector of the economy with taxes. Grr.
Sorry I'd better go drink my coffee (kaffree actually)
-Yog
Parent
Re:Good intentions, bad implimentation (Score:3, Insightful)
Shit! You want to reinvent UUCP?!?
Seriously, I can't even imagine the tax bills for a newsfeed... since of course, the Tax Man (tm) will find a way to apply said tax to Usenet -- it does *resemble* email enough that it'd probably be covered, under any wording a congresscritter will come up with, but AOL's internal email w
Re:Good intentions, bad implimentation (Score:5, Insightful)
> implement such a tax?
By requiring ISPs to purchase licenses, keep records, and file reports, in the same way sales taxes are collected. The government would, of course, find other uses for those records and reports.
> Do you tax intra-company email as well?
Probably not, as long as it doesn't travel over the "public" Internet.
> Do you tax email between different geographical
> branches of the same company?
Probably, though there might be special licenses. "Legitimate" organizations would be allowed to apply for exemptions for mailing-lists. They would, of course, be required to keep records and file reports.
> What about instant messages? efax? VoIP?
A different set of taxes.
> Suppose people work around it by creating VPNs
> and just tunnel their email to members of the
> VPN by encrypted means.
Tax evasion is illegal.
> Methinks this whole idea is looney and it will
> take about a week for people to develop
> workarounds to completely avoid an "email tax".
Thereby justifying the creation of an enforcement bureaucracy with elaborate regulations. You don't think this is really about spam, do you?
Parent
Re:Good intentions, bad implimentation (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the industry as a whole would be *MUCH* better off looking for a technical solution rather than hoping for government intervention.
Ahhha, but what would force the industry to move forward together and adopt a "new" secure public key based electronic mail protocol?
Incompetent government intervention
Yeah baby, bring on the e-mail tax!!
Parent
No good intentions here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Good intentions, bad implimentation (Score:3, Insightful)
Not necessarily. You can classify SPAM in a few ways:
An open relay is used to hand off sending millions of copies of the same email.
Dedicated Spammers have their own servers to do the work (bandwidth is cheap for them, too)
Unsolicited mail from "partners" of real companies that you have a business relationship with
Yes, open relays can be a bad thing as they escalate the number of emails that any one Spammer can send, but this can easily be circumve
Re:Kill the demand, not the spammer (Score:5, Funny)
Bugger that. Kill the damn spammer.
Parent
Re:Government control = bad (Score:5, Interesting)
I do not make a penny running my site and have to pay most of the cost of the server and the colocation and bandwidth out of my own pocket. Even if they charged one penny per email, I could not afford an extra $500/mo or $6000 per year just for the right to send out email notices to users. I couldn't even afford $50/mo or $600/year if we charged one tenth of a penny per message.
Besides, what about system notices? And who/how will the email fee be collected? And why not just support an alternate RFC to promote more secure email standards like secure SMTP?
Parent
Re:I could not afford (Score:3, Interesting)
Would the law apply overseas? I could see lots of people abandoning MSN, Hotmail, & Yahoo mail to use overseas mail services. Would they be able to tax you if you went to the off shore mail server and sent from your account there? What's to keep a spammer from doing the same thing?
I got my first e-mail account while overseas. It's still my primary account. The ISP is a small one so it isn'
Re:Government control = bad (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah. I was kinda thinking. "Hey , looks like someones proposing to make money of email.. where have I heard that before".
Email tax, get rich quick, whats the diference?
Re:Government control = bad (Score:4, Funny)
> I likes my SpamAssassin, thanks ;^)
Me too. I especially like how the last job I applied for on Monster.com got bounced by the HR person's inbox by SpamAssasin because it "looked like spam". Maybe I used too many buzzwords in my resume...
Spam has made it difficult to set up legitimate servers to send legitimate e-mail to their indended recipients...
Parent
This won't work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This won't work. (Score:3, Interesting)
There is nothing at all in the mechanisms of sending e-mail to prevent the volume of spam from increasing another 10- or hundred-fold over the next year. Spam volumes under present conditions will only stop increasing when every spammer is spamming at maximum velocity... that's their incentive and it's a vicious cycle a
Re:This won't work. (Score:4, Funny)
Ever notice there's a return address? Slap a label over your address that says 'return to sender' and drop it off in a mailbox. Imagine their mailroom problems if just 10% were returned. Usually junk mail's not worth the effort since it can just be tossed in the recycling bin, but why should my landfill fill up with these CDs and their cases? Send them back and let AOL deal with it.
Parent
Tax the whole world? (Score:5, Insightful)
outside the USA? Hold the emails in some large mail spooler at the border and send a bill to the people in the foreign countries? Christ , how do people
this dumb ever get elected? Oh
Was that self-realization? (Score:3, Insightful)
Want a politician who actually hears what people are saying to him and tries to problem-solve about it with a certain amount of candor? Here's your guy. ("Weasel words" are not usually h
The Solution Is Already In Place (Score:3, Interesting)
Spammers tailor the stream of bytes to get into other people's computers, bypassing various measures the owners have taken to keep them out. Does this sound like "computer cracking". That's because it is. Did you think that computer cracking is illegal? All together now: That's because it is.
Tax on who? (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides that, it's all just data. You can't tax some packets and not others - people will just develop new protocols to avoid the taxes. Unfortunately you have to understand the technology to make sensible rules governing its use.
I'v already got bayesian filtering, (Score:3, Insightful)
Same thing as with drug, gun, and sex ed. If the vast majority of people weren't so damn irresponsable and stupid then they'd be able to handle either not using drugs or using them responsabily (not only does this apply to marajuana, but also the likes of prozak), certain guns wouldn't need to be outlawed because some dumbfuck would press the trigger by accident and off his entire family. And finally, our kids would not only know where and when sex is ok, but why it is ok and how to make love responsabily.
Either way, if he passes a e-mail tax law, I'll just setup something else that isn't spammable like a VPN between my house and my family members that transmits txt documents into a local folder. Mabye that way the idiots who use the system won't open up sobig viruses and help to make virus problems worse.
so the next outlook virus..... (Score:5, Insightful)
on a more serious note, is there a legal definition of what is spam? i consider anything about M$ Windows based products to be spam because i use a Mac, but i am sure to somebody it may be useful information.
Tax evasion (Score:4, Insightful)
Spammers are already using viruses and hacked accounts to send the email. They won't be paying the tax the victim will.
Time for some OSS innovation? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never understood why this isn't something that the OSS community hasn't tried to tackle.
For business purposes, I want an email system that:
1) Is Spam free.
2) Is secure.
3) Is failsafe - i.e. if the recipient doesn't receive the message, I want to know about it.
Surely from a technical perspective, this isn't that difficult?
Why can't the OSS mail clients agree on a standard for doing this. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible, for instance, to have two mail boxes (or whatever you want to call them) for a single email address - one for "secure emails", and the other for the rest. The secure email box would only recieve emails that were from an approved address.
This could be a great way for OSS software to creep into organisations - I could tell my clients, for instance, hey, if you use Thunderbird, we can email each other more securely/without spam/in a failsafe manner. The network effects of this kind of promotion for OSS could be fantastic.
This looks like an opportunity that's going to waste for the OSS community. Come on guys, or people will start saying we don't innovate!
To defend my senator (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, there are already some wingnut posts on this story, so I feel the need to set the record straight:
This is not just a case of RTFA, it's a case of RTFP (post). Fortunately the post quotes Dayton as saying Dayton says a tax is "just one of the tactics that should be considered, but I don't favor it at this time.".
It's just an idea folks. Obviously we all know it isn't workable, but at least these guys are thinking about the issue in general.
There probably isn't a legislative solution, and I think Mark Dayton is open minded enough to reach that conclusion and then say it publicly. Of course, I don't think it would get as much coverage as this story, because here's a Democrat trying to raise taxes! For shame!
What about the regular mail costs? (Score:3, Insightful)
taxes won't (Score:3, Insightful)
if the government want's to do something, let them prosecute. most spammers live in the us and canada. in almost all the spamm i've ever seen their is enough fraud and misrepresentation in each email to at least bring charges in civil court with current laws.
Spammers already break the law (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem of spam is already a problem of laws going unenforced against an entrenched criminal element. While spamming itself may not be explicitly illegal, the act of spamming is not separable from acts which are illegal, such as fraud, conversion, and theft of services. Many (including some spammers) are under the misapprehension that because these laws go unenforced, spam is thereby legal. Indeed, the problem of enforcement is so bad that blatantly destructive acts such as denial-of-service attacks against anti-spam services have gone utterly uninvestigated by law enforcement. (This may be changing.) [spamhaus.org]
It is utterly unnecessary to create further laws which penalize ordinary Net users, in an effort to stop spammers. Indeed, such laws simply aggravate the problem already posed by spam: increasing the bother, inconvenience, and expense of using and operating the mail system. In effect, such laws would help the spammers destroy email.
If this were possible, it wouldn't be needed (Score:4, Interesting)
A better Minnesota solution (Score:3, Funny)
California could explore this option too.
Take Dayton at his word: he rambles (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, the point is that this is more "Hey, this might be an idea, or whatever, I really don't know," than it is "I have this secret plot I want to enact, but I'll throw you off the trail by claiming I'm unsure about it."
possible scenario (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, there would be implementation issues and privacy concerns, problems, etc., but if this were in place I can't help but think it would make a positive difference. And before I get slammed by everyone, I realize there are all kinds of problems with legislating spam behavior in this country. The most obvious of which is the spammer's ability to simply relocate their operation outside the U.S. border where U.S. laws will have a much more difficult time taking effect.
Keep in mind that I'm not trying to invent the solution in this post, so don't take it like I'm defending the silver bullet to the problem of spamming, or go on a crusade to prove why I'm wrong. I just think this is an interesting idea. There are problems with every other spam prevention idea, evidenced by the continued (and growing) presence of spam for the majority of people (ie, not just computer geeks; spam reduction has to work for people like our grandparents and non-nerdy friends, and it will have to be transparent for it to work).
I think the email tax seems like one of the least shitty solutions out there. Anyone else have other, not-so-shitty solutions to spam?
Mailing lists... (Score:4, Insightful)
And if you work as user support for a small company, replying by email? Suddenly costs of operating rapidly rise. You operate a free web forum, where people subscribe and an automated reply sends them their password, and optionally get email notifications on changes in threads they watch. Your forum can't be free anymore.
I can think of a dozen other legitimate uses for sending bulk amounts of emails. Even with $0.01/email, with one email a day for some 500 users, that makes $150/month. Can easily kill any free service.
What exactly is an email? (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens with email from outside of the taxing jurisdiction? Does the receiver pay? (That would be cool. I could just 'drive' across the border and mail bomb people I don't like. POW! right in the checkbook!)
I used to think "sender pays" would kill spam, too (Score:3, Interesting)
...and then I realised it would kill mailing lists, too.
Then again, it might be made to work if, instead of the government taxing every outgoing mail spool, ISPs charged other ISPs for the privilege of sending mail to their users. That is, when fred@aol.com sends a mail to jim@hotmail.com, AOL has to pay Hotmail 1/10 cent, or however much the "tax" is set at. These charges would be aggregated, so there would be one monthly bill instead of trillions of nano-payments. Your ISP subscription could include, say, 1000 free emails per month, or 12,000 per year.
I would expect that for normal email traffic, the amount flowing in each direction would be about equal. When someone starts spamming, though, their ISP is slapped with large invoices. If the ISP has any sense, they pass those invoices on to the spammer. If the invoices aren't paid, the ISP that sent them refuses any traffic from those IP blocks.
For spam that comes through open relays or proxies, invoice whoever runs the open machine, and let them worry about where it really came from. If they can find the spammer and recover the cost from him, great. If not, they'll have learned a valuable lesson about not leaving an unsecured box on the open Internet.
A scheme that requires all (or many) ISPs to change their behaviour would be difficult to get working, but easier than one that requires all (or many) email users to change. The biggest problem I foresee is that it's notoriously hard to extract money from a spammer. Still, if ISPs who are currently spam-friendly know that selling connectivity to a spammer will cost them a large amount of money, they might be more careful about whom they sign up.
Spammers don't use their own email boxes... (Score:3, Insightful)
Somebody buy 'm a clue.
Enforce the fraud laws, not TAXES! (Score:3, Insightful)
First we'll have the $0.00001 per email tax. It will fail, but we're told its failing because enforcement doesn't work when you don't know where the SMTP servers are. Which means that we'll have a law requiring SMTP server registration, enforced by the IRS and your ISP.
Forget to pay your SMTP tax when setting up your new box? Good news! The IRS can now search your hard disk (gotta know how much untaxed mail you sent) and then file tax liens against your bank account and your home.
When these don't work, we'll be told that the tax rate isn't high enough. So they'll raise it. And keep raising it. And then someone will figure out that it's a great way to put PCs in poor neighborhoods or some other "worthy" project.
Have I mentioned Ashcroft's take on SMTP registration?
Enforce the fraud laws. Arrest the people behind SPAM products. Ensnare the spammers as part of the conspiracy. That will solve the problem. Everything else just takes away our rights AND or money.
News from AD 2010 (Score:3, Insightful)
Attorney general for life John Ashcroft commented "too late, assholes. In twenty oh three you let the camel get his nose in the tent, and now he's screwing your wife."
Interesting, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously, the computer SENDING the email pays the tax. But this means that some form of compliance checking will have to be put into place. Which means a change to the email protocols. But, other countries may not comply. Of course, running an email service for sending may simply be declared illegal, forcing all emails through a centralized point. This solution also has its problems. I guess the tax revenue collected could be used to run the central email servers.
Ratboy
OK, here's the study (Score:4, Insightful)
An email is a message in a well known format composed a sequence of TCP/IP packets, usually but not always sent via a port 25 socket on an SMTP server, and usually but not always retrieved from a POP3 or IMAP server.
As the expressed intent is not to to punish recipients, the notion of taxing retrieval of emails is dismissed out of hand. Only the sending and relaying will be considered.
An SMTP server can be configured to handle email from anybody (an open relay) either deliberately or through incompetence or malice. Some SMTP server can be configured to require authorisation before handling email. Some SMTP servers are configured to only accept or send email to certain domains. Some SMTP servers are hidden (successfully or otherwise) on non-standard ports, behind firewalls, or are only accessible via (e.g.) SSH encrpyted connections. Some SMTP servers handle email only for a specific organisation, or for a specific machine.
SMTP servers are freely available for most computer platforms. Most linux distributions, for example, come with one or more SMTP servers as standard, there are several free SMTP servers avaiable for Windows, many email viruses contain their own SMTP servers to propagate themselves, or a simple SMTP server can be written in a few dozen lines of code or script.
Anyone connected to the internet anywhere in the world can set up an SMTP server and provide services to anyone they like. This may be against the acceptable use policy of their internet service provider (ISP), and their ISP may try to prevent it by technical means such as blocking the well known SMTP port 25, but there are ways to disguise the traffic or bypass these restrictions, including relaying to open SMTP servers on non standard ports and/or using SSH tunnels. Spammers can set up their own SMTP servers rather than using their ISP's servers, or can find and use open SMTP relays based anywhere in the world.
There is no practical way to oblige or enforce taxation on the administrator of an email server. Large US based ISPs could conceivably be taxed, but spammers commonly use open relays or their own SMTP servers. These can be based anywhere in the world. How will US legislation enforce taxation in Russia, for example? As a futher issue, at what level does email attract taxation? When it is being sent anywhere in the world? When it is being sent within the US? When it is sent from outside the US to servers inside the US? When it is sent within a subset of the internet, like a corporate or academic network, which can comprise tens of thousands of users? At the individual machine level?
Email is relayed across SMTP servers. In theory, it would be possible to tax the receiving SMTP servers of US based, large corporate ISPs and have them bill the sender. In practice, ISPs would be unable to collect this, and would in any case have to have accounts for every possible sender. This would lead to them either: rejecting email from the vast majority of non-US ISPs and being rejected in turn, effectively cutting the US off from the email network; or more likely, passing the costs on to the US based individual recipient either directly or indirectly.
In summary, Senator Dayton, the only practical way to keep the internet safe for Americans is to wall off part of it and declare a Fortress USA.
Any ISP who wanted to do that could do it right now. AOL could do it tomorrow. They have, for example, repeatedly experimented with rejecting email that appears to come from SMTP servers that don't appear to match the registered SMTP servers (well, their IP addresses) for the apparent sender's domain name. The reason why I repeat "apparent" is that these factors can be faked by malicious spammers, but that they catch out many legitimate senders, to the point where this policy has been unenforcable.
Thank you, Senator Dayton, for your interest in these matters, and for taking the time to suggest a superficial knee jerk solution that would wreck the internet as we know it beyond repair. I suggest that you sack whatever idiot nephew you employ as a researcher and take some actual advice on this issue before you do some real damage.
Unnecessary coupling. "Fee" shouldn't imply "Tax" (Score:4, Interesting)
But, also clear is that a government mandated tax would be absolutely the wrong way to impose this cost.
If a citizen wants to setup his email client so that all messages from strangers are deleted unless accompanied by a $5.00 paypal donation, that's his business! "Pay for email" can be implemented without government help. If we ever get a functioning micropayment system so that transactions of less than $0.05 can be cheaply exchanged, then it's quite probable that big ISPs (starting with AOL) will let their users elect to block all non-whitelisted emails unless the sender paid a minor fee to compensate for time wasted reading.
If the question is: "Should email require a stamp-like payment?", the answer is maybe.
But "Should the government tax email?", no.
If consumers decide that per-email fees are a fair price for eliminating spam, then private enterprise can provide it without state meddling. Pay-email poses technical and administrative challenges, so it might not ever really work- but sticking the IRS in there would just strengthen the obstacles.
Re:Anything to get more money (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it does. In China and Japan, at least.
Parent
Re:Anything to get more money (Score:3, Informative)
That's 100% backwards. Japan doesn't try to reduce childbirth, and has no worries about overpopulation. It's got a birthrate of much less than 2 kids per family, and the government is terrified. (They're fearful that the future won't have enough citizens to tax- a problem the US might face in the 2ks as well).
That low rate is apparently the natural consequence of wealthy people in constricted space; nobody wants their kids to live on smaller lots than th
First the email tax (Score:4, Interesting)
Between this story and the story of third world countries wanting the UN to "control" the Internet because IANA is too US-centric, I really get the idea that government-control types really have no clue what the Internet is. If you "regulate" the Internet with taxes, restrictions, etc, another network will rise to take it's place. The main feature of the Internet is relative anarchy (also called freedom). Are there rules on the net? Of course! It's called "consensus"! Deal with it.
Parent
Re:Haha! (Score:5, Interesting)
The funny thing that these moron legislators don't understand is, if they could collect the tax on mass e-mailing then they could just as likely just outlaw sending UCE entirely and hold the people doing it responsible. The problem is it's nearly impossible to pinpoint who is sending all this garbage. Why would they pay the e-mail tax when they're already conducting fraud?
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Re:Oh geeze, not again (Score:4, Insightful)
Even from a strictly legal point of view, the US government can't tax e-mail sent out from the country -- export duties are expressly forbidden by the Constitution.
Just what we need to burnish America's international image: an anti-spam policy that specifically exempts Americans who spam furriners.
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