Free e - ring armor is too good to be true anyway , veracious ? But can the government find a way of life to crash the party and slap taxis all over those puppy pictures you just zip to grandma ’s AOL account ? Someone has to pay for all of these traffic brightness level and cruise projectile , you have sex .
With headline after headline sounding the decease knell for the cash - hemorrhaging U.S. Postal Service , it ’s almost easy to see the logic of an due east - ring armour tax . give just the tiniest toll to a few of the 145 billion e - mail that zing through the Internet each Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , and you could conceivably stave off the Postal Service ’s imminent dying – with enough left over to add to the structure of the Internet itself to make it quicker and more effective [ source : Mashable ] . So nerve yourselves . A taxation on e - mail may be inevitable and coming sooner rather than later .
Only it ’s not , really . The panic-struck myth of ane - mailtax has been around almost as long as the WWW . Its origins are a portmanteau of partial truth commix with the viral appeal of a digital chain letter .
In 1997 , Arthur Cordell , a former information engineering science adviser for the Canadian government , propose the thought of abit tax . The concept basically tax hoi polloi on the amount of entropy they send and receive via the cyberspace . A couple of age later , the United Nations Development Programme liberate its Human Development Report , which admit a citation of a so - called bit tax . For every 100 einsteinium - mails per Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , there would be a tax of just one cent .
By the report ’s estimate in 1996 , this revenue enhancement would have raised an astonishing $ 70 billion [ source : UNDP ] . Just call up of all of the good things the politics of the world could do with that kind of cash . It ’s a whole mint of dealings lights .
That revenue enhancement never amount to be , of course , because it did n’t realize the kind of support it would require to overcome the many political and logistical obstacle necessitate . Keep reading , though . We ’ll deal more vitamin E - mailtaxproposals – some silly … and some that are more serious .
The Post Office’s Piggybank
In the U.S. , the Postal Service has been losing money at a head - spinning rate for a very farsighted time . That ’s due partly to the popularity of e - chain armor , which has contributed to a more than 25 per centum drib in chain mail volume since 2010 . In just the last one-quarter of 2012 , the agency lost $ 1.3 billion , and to stop over the bleeding , it make up one’s mind to nix Saturday chain armour delivery [ source : Reuters ] . for sure , if there ’s an organisation deserving saving through tax , it must be the USPS . Right ?
Enter Bill 602P , which would theoretically levy a 5 - cent tax on every e - mail . That money , of course , would be funneled to the USPS . Never mind that theUSPShas dead nothing to do with atomic number 99 - mail .
Only , there is n’t any Bill 602P. It ’s an cyberspace urban legend birl off from a Canadian version that spouted the same kind of rhetoric . All of the details about 602P are fictional .
That did n’t halt the medium from reporting on it , though , or from bugging political power player about it . In a 2000 senate race , atelevisionnews reporter named Marcia Kramer asked both Hilary Clinton and Rick Lazio about the bill ’s details . Unsurprisingly , both nominee talk out against the fictional duty .
Although this placard never existed , the plot line behind it has been a pervasive net hoax , and one that ’s difficult to entirely quash .
It ’s not hard to see how this form of rumour could commence . The hoax play right on into the highly bare struggle of an iconic ( and more and more irrelevant ) psychiatric hospital . Also , since online shopping became so popular , there ’s been unyielding confusion about how different states and res publica apply sales taxis . on-line sales taxation and vitamin E - mail revenue enhancement are two very unlike things , but when you supply in a dash of fright and wrath about taxation in general , you wind up a good formula for a spate of uproar about nothing .
At present , there are actually laws in stead protect against these form of taxes . In 1998 , President Bill Clinton signed the Internet Tax Freedom Act , which prohibit governments at every story from applying Internet - only taxis upon consumer . That admit , of course , those fictional minute revenue enhancement and e - mail taxes , as well as bandwidth taxis .
law can be repealed , of course . And some people say this one should be changed so that regime can finally tap into e - mail service transference for receipts . So do n’t put away your pitchfork just yet . There might still be some Camellia sinensis that require to be tossed into the ocean .
An Impossible Proposal?
What if lawmaker all of a sudden adjudicate to repeal the Internet Tax Freedom Act ? Would an eastward - mail taxation suddenly be inevitable ? And if such a taxation did exist , how would it work , exactly ?
There are some mass who ’d care to notice out the answers to those questions . In early 2013 , Gordon Wozniak , a city councilperson in Berkeley , Calif. , reintroduce the idea of a bit tax to the American consciousness . He project a bit tax on the society of one centime per Gbit transferred through theInternet , as well as a " very tiny " tax on e - mail [ source : Bradford ] . His mathematics is a moment on the fuzzy side , though , when he says such taxes would " plausibly " rake in gazillion of dollars per year .
That revenue could be deviate in part to the USPS to keep it afloat . Wozniak also enunciate that such a tax would be a baulk to e - mail service spammers , who trust on the sleazy ubiquitousness of e - ring mail to annoy and scam people all across the globe . In one swoop , the Postal Service is saved and spam could be virtually eliminated .
From a lucid point of view , it seems more than a little strange to divert revenue from e - ring mail taxis to the USPS . After all , the two service are wholly unlike .
But let ’s assume that lawmakers decide to essay and inflict this new tax . Logistically , it would be passably challenging to task people on the number of eastward - mails they sent . Because there are so many alternatives to east - mail , such as textbook message andsocial mediasites , people could easily duck revenue enhancement simply by choosing a different form of communicating .
So to make a bit tax workable , proponents recommend for a mere blanket taxation that could be tack on to your monthly Internet serve subscription . Whether you send one e - mail or 100,000 e - mails , the rate would be the same . That ’s certainly doable . But thanks to the Internet Tax Freedom Act , it ’s also currently illegal .
If the chemical reaction to Wozniak ’s plan is any indication , the idea of overturning the deed is moderately far - fetched . His thought were met with almost universal contempt and derision . lawmaker would be struggle against their own constituency just to make such a tax legal , and by the time made any headway , they ’d most likely be run out of office .
So if you ’re alarmed by headlines about vitamin E - ring armour taxation , you’re able to rachet up down from red-faced alert . Those taxes are n’t going to find anytime soon . And with new forms of online communication invariably in developing , by the time any such taxis do become a realism , you may not give care .
Lots More Information
lease ’s face it – if our net service providers bring a 10 - cent tax to our monthly bills in the form of a bit tax , how many of us would even remark ? Not many , probably . But many people still see the Internet as a gratuitous , wild post where selective information is shared and proliferated at a marvelously scurvy cost to the end user . That ’s probably why so many people have a violent reaction to the idea of an vitamin E - mail tax . Well , that and the fact that people just hate taxes . Long live free e - mail !
