more on EU to tax e-mail, text messages?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Matthew Stibbe <matthew () stibbe net>
Date: May 30, 2006 10:25:49 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: RE: [IP] more on EU to tax e-mail, text messages?

For IP if you like.

"EU to tax e-mail, text messages" seems like a bit of a canard to me.
The European Union doesn't have any tax-raising powers. These are
explicitly reserved to member states.

Just because a member of the European Parliament (which sounds powerful
and important but isn't) says it might be a good idea doesn't mean it's
possible, never mind likely.  If the EU started taxing citizens directly
there would be a revolution and many countries would simply leave.  We
Europeans love our cell phones more than we love the EU.

However, an EU institution did make an decision today which IP'ers might
be interested in.  According to the BBC
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5028918.stm) the European Court
of Justice (which is powerful and important - think Supreme Court) has
ruled that an agreement between the EU and US over the transfer of
airline passenger data to the US intelligence services did not guarantee
adequate levels of data protection and has blocked it, giving the EU
until the end of September to find another approach.

Matthew Stibbe
Writer in chief
Articulate Marketing
www.articulatemarketing.com
020 7193 7105

PS Check out my new blogs: www.badlanguage.net and www.modernpilot.com.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: 30 May 2006 15:06
To: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: [IP] more on EU to tax e-mail, text messages?



Begin forwarded message:

From: John Levine <johnl () iecc com>
Date: May 30, 2006 12:37:35 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: lauren () vortex com
Subject: Re: [IP] more on EU to tax e-mail, text messages?

> Taxing text/SMS messages may be somewhat practical, but trying to do
> the same with e-mail will open a Pandora's box of problems.

Agreed.  Taxing SMS is easy since they're already metered (at least in
Europe where they're charged to the sender.)  Taxing email or any
other per-message e-mail charge is fundamentally impratical because
the cost of building the infrastructure to collect the charges would
cost far more than the revenue to be collected.  And as Lauren noted,
since e-mail has no security at all, there'd be a vast array of scams
to charge the tax other than the actual sender.

I have a well-known white paper on e-postage on my web site at
http://www.taugh.com that lays out the problems that doom e-postage in
more detail.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl () iecc com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for
Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.



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