Email Tax - Heard on today's Huckabee Report

Today is Friday 29-MAY-2009 and I heard on todays "The Huckabee Report" about a proposed new e-mail tax.

For those of us who've been around the web for a while rumours such as this are nothing new. After all, unless you've been dead, you've heard about the dreaded "Bill 602b." That one was, of course, a hoax. It purported to levy a fee of $.05 per each email sent, and it was forwarded and forwarded ... and forwarded some more. And then somebody who hadn't seen it got it ... and it got forwarded again.

But Mr Huckabee today mentioned a new proposal to tax email which would be a fee of $.01 per email sent. In looking around the web today, I ran across this: http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/the-case-for-taxing-e-mail/

That is, of course, a blog. But the title should chill you "The Case for Taxing E-Mail."

And then there's this one: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10764

The title? "We need an email tax."

My answer - rubbish. I will concede the fact that some 200 billion of spam emails are sent - per day. Not per week or month ... every day. Filters help keep some of it out of our email boxes, yet some of it gets through.

But while they're right that the volume of junk email will likely continue to grow, I seriously doubt that an email tax would help solve the problem.

Case #1: a junk emailer sets up operations on some small Caribbean island. He (or she) has his modem, a computer, and a program that can churn out thousands of emails in a flash. He (or she) sends out the email, packs up his computers and other equipment ... and then moves elsewhere.

Those who favour such a tax are, in my opinion, missing something. Our hypothetical junk emailer just blasted several hundred thousands of junk emails ... and then moved. How do you propose to tax him? His ISP would get hit by the tax, which they would then tack onto his bill. There's just one problem - he's nowhere to be found. The ISP would be forced to foot the bill, but don't think they'd be happy about it. They'd have to recoup their costs elsewhere ... and we all know what they'd do; they'd increase rates for the rest of us.

Case #2: A computer somewhere in the continental United States gets infected by a nasty trojan. This one updates itself and installs a junk email sender. For those people who are laughing at the thought of this happening - don't. It's happened already and the odds are that it will continue to happen. The victim, in this case an 86-year young grandmother of five, opens up the bill from her ISP and finds a charge of $815.27.

It seems that that trojan had indeed been busy. Oh, yes. Of course, she's not to blame, the problem started when her teenaged grandson went to one of "those" sites. Yet the ISP is going to insist that she pay it. Or at least a part of it.

Such things already happen with cell phones. Imagine being near the border of Mexico and using your mobile. The phone looks for the strongest signal it can get and will switch over as needed. Yet it's already happened where somebody who was physically in the United States had his mobile lock onto a Mexican tower. You can imagine what his bill looked like.

Many of these junk emailers are overseas, so getting them to pay for sending out junk is going to be hard. We've also seen where various digital nasties, an example being Klez, will fake sender's names.

I know that the money-hungry pols need to get more money to pay for the Obamessiah's spending spree, but this won't work. Proponents of this proposed tax say that it's a way to help reduce the deluge of spam and to pay for improvements, such as more bandwidth.

Rubbish. Pure and simple rubbish.