On Jan 12, 2005, at 2:42 AM, dhbailey wrote:
That's a bit of a pipe-dream, isn't it? If hackers can spoof my e-mail address so it appears to come from New Hampshire, why do you think they would be able to block e-mail from a specific country? All they would have to do is to spoof everything (it won't be long before that happens, even if hasn't already) in the headers.
No, it's not a pipe dream. It's a sound policy goal which is still searching for a sound means of implementation. We've already acknowledged that there are practical obstacles that need to be figured out. You cite one such obstacle and present it as evidence that the goal is bad. By your logic, we may as well give up on reducing health care costs, fighting terrorism, and curing cancer as well.
Like traffic congestion, air pollution, and overfishing the oceans, email spam is the product of a market failure. It's perfectly reasonable to look for a mechanism to correct that market failure.
A charge on e-mails won't stop the spam -- the USPS keeps charging people for mailing junk mail, and it hasn't stemmed the tide of garbage that gets into my mailbox.
Oh yes it has. You don't think that you'd get ten times as much junk mail if postage were free? I've worked in the junk mail industry and I can assure you that they are very very aware of what sort of a response rate they get for every piece. The single biggest concern of junk mailers is how to improve their response rate, and a big part of that equation is eliminating people from their list who they know won't respond. There is no such incentive for email spammers. That's the problem.
The spam will merely change shape, where there will be monolithic spam operations in legitimate countries, paying the fee, which they will develop enough political clout to put a cap on the e-mail payments, so the spam-centers will pay a large amount, but on a per-message basis, it will end up being so cheap as to do nothing except to make some millionaires out of a few enterprising spammers who work around the charges.
And it will cost all the rest of us and then lead to other internet taxes once governments see all the income generated by your innocuous e-mail tax.
Face it, folks, junk mail, pesky phone calls, spam, are a part of life, live with however you want, with a white-list service, with 57 different e-mail addresses, whatever you want, but tread lightly when you start willingly offer to pay a tax.
Remember the US income tax, originally at something like 3%, which wasn't written into the Constitutional amendment only because everybody agreed back then that nobody would ever need to raise it above that. It seemed so unlikely as to be impossible, and now look at it!
I'd rather receive 500 FREE spams each day and keep e-mail free, than to pay an initial tax of $7 as someone suggested. Because I know that in another few years it will be $70, then $700 and then the internet will become the haven of only the wealthy and the whole benefit of the instantaneous, free interchange of information will be gone in a flash and we'll be stuck with just another income-producer for bloated worthless governments to suck dry.
Jeez, talk about paranoid. Your comparison to income tax is a terrible analogy, for so many reasons. Aside from getting your facts wrong, you imply that income tax is both a typical tax and analogous to the discussion at hand, when in fact it is neither.
There are numerous reasons why income tax expanded in the 20th century as a means of funding the growing public sector, none of which have anything to putting a small fee on emails. It is not a universal pattern that every tax increases enormously once it is put into place. Our income tax is atypical, and you'd be hard pressed to name any tax that has had a similar history. Anyway, even if an email tax does increase at the same rate that U.S. income tax did historically, you're still looking at about a 15-fold increase over the course of 90 years, not the 100-fold increase in "few years" that you describe in your hyperbolic last paragraph.
A better comparison would be the price of a postage stamp. When the first U.S. postage stamp was released in 1847, the price to mail a letter was 5 cents. Adjusted for inflation, that's equivalent to about one dollar in today's money, which means that in the course of 150 years the fee went down, not up.
As for that "initial tax of $7" that "someone suggested", you got that number from me, and it was put forth as a maximal estimate, assuming a fee of 0.02 cents per piece on a person who sends 100 emails a day. Do you send a hundred emails a day? If you're like the rest of us, your output is probably closer to 20 a day, if even that. And there's no reason your ISP can't give you an allowance of $5 or whatever. The cost to the normal user must be trivial. That's not just an auxiliary policy goal; it is essential to the working of the mechanism.
Your description of the history of the income tax just plain wrong. It's not even history at all, just urban legend. The 16th amendment did not create income tax in the United States. We had income taxes during the Civil War period. What prompted the constitutional amendment was an action by the activist Supreme Court of the 1890s which declared such taxes unconstitutional based on a creative interpretation of the language in I:2:3 and I:9:4 of the Constitution. These passages (now superseded) specified that federal taxes must be levied proportionally to the size of the states -- so that small states like Delaware and Rhode Island would not be obliged to feed the federal government the same amount of money large states like Virginia and New York would. The Gilded Age Court construed these sentences to mean that Congress had no right to impose any tax which was not based upon a census enumeration (Pollock v Farmers Loan, 157 US 429 (1895)), notwithstanding historical precedent to the contrary. The 16th amendment was devised to overturn this interpretation: hence its simple language with the emphasis on "without regard to any census or enumeration".
The idea that the 16th amendment somehow created a hitherto forbidden national income tax is a modern fabrication. It is not true, no matter how many times you hear it repeated on talk radio. The further notions that it was intended to be only 3% and that a limit would have been written into the amendment if only anyone could have imagined that it might be increased beyond that are fanciful embellishments of the fiction.
The express purpose of the income tax -- whether in 1864, 1895, 1913, or 2004 -- is to fund the federal government. The purpose of a per-piece fee on email would be to remove the cost of the transaction from the receiver, who now bears it, to the sender, who is responsible for creating the message, thus repairing the broken economic incentives. It would not exist to fund any government, nor should it.
This misunderstanding is partly my fault. It was careless of me to repeat the word "tax" in this discussion, knowing that it sets off alarm bells in so many people's heads. I see no reason why the proceeds of an per-piece email fee should go to any governmental body at all. We've already acknowledged in this discussion that the nature of the Internet makes a government collection impractical anyway. A fee system is far more likely to come about by a protocol willingly subscribed to by a preponderance of participating ISPs -- which is, after all, how the Internet itself functions.
The per-piece sender fees might just as well be redistributed directly to email receivers on an identical per-piece basis. That way, if you happen to be a person who receives more emails than he sends, that 60-cent monthly fee which had you so terrified could instead be an equally insignificant monthly windfall. A normal ISP is going to have roughly as many senders as receivers, in which case the fee becomes a matter of accounting, and not any net loss. To whatever extent it does represent an expense, that would be balanced against the gain that all ISPs would enjoy from the prospective reduction in spam. The ISPs that would object are the ones that make their living being a haven for spammers, but if a large enough community chooses to participate in some sort of protocol, those others could simply be shut out. The mainstream ISPs could simply refuse to continue propagating their email.
Obviously, this is just a very sketchy idea, and there's a whole lot of problems that would have to be worked out -- for example, the proposal as I've stated it would create an incentive for users to sign up for a lot of mailing lists that they don't read. My point here is not to proclaim the answer, which I surely don't have, but just to better illuminate the nature of the problem.
mdl
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