Email Taxes

This post addresses a proposed email tax by AOL and Yahoo. In an effort to stop the scourge of spam and other email nasties, the companies have proposed to impose a .0025 cent tax on every email sent. It is supposed that such a tax would enable the email hosts to provide better service on par with the U.S. Postal Service. Much dissention and skepticism, myself include, is raised over the proposed rationale for this tax (gee, I'm using the word "proposed" a lot today). It is believed that email host companies are using quality as a subterfuge for potential billions of dollars in revenue. Imagine, for every four emails you send, the company make 1 penny. That means 1 dollar for every 400 emails. I know that I send over 100 emails per day. That means that I would be charged about $2 per week or $8 to $10 per month to use a "free" email service. Multiply that by the 50 million plus people who likely use these services, and you can see how $1 billion per month is likely the real driving force behind an email tax. Is this just efficient generation of capital or unbriddled greed? The old debate between cyber-capitalists and online-libertarians thus rages on. While I consider myself among the "reasonable-person's" camp, I can't help but think how unefficent the U.S. Postal Service is at times and how much junk crap mail I receive and throw away on a daily basis. To me, this seems to harm AOL and Yahoo's desire to bring their service on par with the postal system. I think that the anti-spam and blocked user protection is working just fine. If this is anything, it is an indication that we need to re-think the revenue generation of such services as these (the current scheme of dollar generation from "free-e-mail" comes from advertisements and premium services upgrades).