I love it when the technically illiterate opine on things they barely understand - like the supposed ease of taxing email. From the NY Times' "Idea of the Day":

Such a tax is feasible, he says, since e-mail addresses are easily identifiable by Internet service providers and they could pass on the levy in their monthly bills to users.

So... does my ISP (Verizon) monitor my HTTP traffic and charge me for usage of GMail? How about my VPN for when I use corporate mail? Or does that get kicked back to the providers, who then have to somehow figure out how to pass that cost on to end users?

How about a spam email that originates from a location outside the US? Given the current email protocols, how does an email system tell whether the sender paid the tax or not? Assuming you find a way around that problem, how does that system tell whether the credentials that claim the tax was paid are valid or not? Does the author assume that those can't be faked either?

The funny thing is, my daughter's generation is already routing around this entire problem. Between things like SMS and Facebook, they avoid spam entirely - by avoiding email.

Technorati Tags: email, spam