Senator Proposes Email Tax
from the ah,-that-again dept
One of the popular ideas that always gets kicked around as a way to stop spam is to add a "small" fee to every email that gets sent. This isn't on the basis of any real costs, but simply on the basis of stopping spam. Now it appears that a Senator is starting to push for the idea (though, worded in a way that he can later say he didn't push for it - if it proves to be politically unpopular). At a first pass, it may sound sensible, but there are any number of problems with the idea. First, the added cost of setting up, monitoring and maintaining such a system - and collecting the "tax" would be prohibitively expensive. Not to mention the fact that spammers would simply figure out a way around the plan - and the only people left paying the "tax" would be folks sending email legitimately. Running a mailing list would suddenly become much more expensive as well. It sounds like, so far, most of the problems with an email tax have been clearly stated, so it's unlikely to go anywhere. These are all attempts at "simple" solutions - and people are becoming aware of the fact that spam isn't a simple problem with a simple solution.
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What about all my good friends in China who want to sell me herbal via..., oh, wait, nevermind. those are not my good friends, my fault, sorry
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Taxes for this scheme should be levied on the sender, and no, national issues are not really a problem: every telco in every nation charges a connection fee to telcos from other countries for every call completed to their country. It would become an international phenomenon, to be sure.
For such a system to be built, you'd need an email payment clearinghouse and encryption/security for said system.
Let's face it, upgrading the world's email systems to make them spam free, secure, and encrypted would be nice. I'd pay by the message for those things. Pity it takes a government action to make such a solution viable.
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Why not..
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The answer is to drop SMTP and use a more secure protocol that authneticates the sender certificate and provides some authentication. If you slow the bulk mail down by process, it will become unprofitable. Spammers usually blast millions of emails an hour, I don't know of any mailing list that has that many subscribers (so that "what about mailing lists" arguement is not an issue since legit lists won't mind identifying themselves).
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