That idea was explored and defeated in detail in a hilarious short story, written in 1996.

Postage Due

This should work really well. The post office charges for delivery and I never get any junk mail!

There are a never-ending supply of people who can do so much good with other people's money.

Yes, we must have more money for gov't. More. More. More.

Failure of a gov't program just means not enough money has been spent.

I like how he unabashedly states that gov't taxation is a way to punish/deter spammers. "Dear Mr. Skelton, I find that I am paying massive taxes for little service, and often that money is used to further sodomize me with large, irregularly shaped objects. So I agree with you that taxation is a good way to punish and deter. Maybe someday we can begin to tax LA Times columnists and gov't bureaucrats, and thus raise the billions needed to give everyone everything they want."

My ire above was meant to be directed at the
bezerkley central planner.

I actually had the opposite idea.

The problem with gmail, hotmail, etc is that there is no expectation of privacy. They can read your email. Whereas with a letter, there is an expectation of privacy, other people can't read your mail.

Set up a government email program, facebook-type network, and other such products where there IS an expectation of privacy, and your messages/accounts can't be looked at without probably cause, and your info cannot be sold. Charge a small fee for it.

Not everyone would go for it but I bet you'd be able to get a few customers to subsidize the regular mail program.

He doesn't have a clue about how the spam industry actually operates, either. Nearly all spam is delivered either using offshore servers, or via botnets. There is no entity you can put your finger on to tax.

"I'd allow everyone a certain number of untaxed, private emails a month -- 100, maybe 200."

Well thank you all great and mighty benevolent ruler for "allowing" me the freedom to send a random number of emails a month!

fending off these spammers and scammers and denying them free access

Again, going after the law abiding to attack the criminals? really? I can show you the logs were scofflaws routinely attack my network looking for insecure points they can infiltrate and gain access. And they do such attacks from other compromised machines. They will be paying this tax how??

Besides I (or my employer) pays for my/our bandwidth. What I/we do with it is up to us, within the confines of the various computer crimes acts.

Any such tax revenues should go to DARPA, who birthed this beastie we call Teh Internetz.

Your name is Wozniak, eh? probably not related to the other Wozniak. At least I hope not.

So the gov't would profit more the more SPAM I get sent. They would quickly make spam blockers illegal as tax evasions.
Besides, my ISP, is a company which charges me for bandwidth, I am sure is taxed on the maoney it takes in. So in effect it already is taxed.

The problem with gmail, hotmail, etc is that there is no expectation of privacy. They can read your email.

They only way you can provide this expectation of privacy is by encrypting your email. Period. Yes, the above entities can and do scan your email. It is right there in the terms of service.

So does the NSA, since your email may float past them and they have access to the major network access points. And I can always run the "spook" command in emacs if I want to give them conniptions.

Otherwise, any privacy in your email is done on a honor system.

Whereas with a letter, there is an expectation of privacy, other people can't read your mail.

Unless they violate the law, that is...

I hate to tell you this, bozos[Skelton, and Wozniak], but you don't OWN the internet... it would be called World Wide Web for a reason...

you don't think if you try to tax email that some other type of service won't spring up?

Probably 99% of us wouldn't pay much tax at all.

Ah, the siren song of the tax raising crowd, "It won't affect you. You won't pay any taxes. Only they will."

Unless they violate the law, that is...

They swear they'll never take advantage of the ability to read all private data (including all SMS data and such).. but I don't care about the CIO or most people, it's that one jackass that might do it that worries me.

There was one guy years ago that would knowingly break rules and read people's private emails. He never was punished because, shocker, his parents were friends with company big-wigs and owned a huge % of stock.

This thing is so stupid, naive, and immoral on so many levels it reads like it was written by a 10-year-old. Disgusting.

"Probably 99% of us wouldn't pay much tax at all"

It's not going to cost us anything non-negligible, and yet SOMEHOW it's simultaneously going to come up with enough revenue to 'blanket the country with Wifi'. From where, the Wifi fairy?

"I'd allow everyone a certain number of untaxed, private emails a month"

Wow, thank you for 'allowing' people to send messages to one another over the networks they pay for, so generous. What other use of our own property do we need to ask your permission to use?

This makes as much sense as a tax on using cars in order to prop up a dying buggywhip industry.

What even qualifies as 'email'? All that would happen is that people would flock to the sixty trillion other ways to communicate over the Internet, like IMs or HTTP-based communications platforms (of which blog comments would surely qualify, so I guess we'd need to tax blog commenters too ... the surveillance infrastructure required just to ensure compliance would be so massive and so complex and so expensive it alone would either cost more than you'd bring in in revenue, or you'd have to massively raise the level of taxation just to cover compliance costs).

"Set up a government email program, facebook-type network, and other such products where there IS an expectation of privacy, and your messages/accounts can't be looked at without probably cause, and your info cannot be sold. Charge a small fee for it"

NicoleK, there are email systems that are fully 100% private. They don't even charge, they're FREE, and they've been around for DECADES (e.g. PGP, which was created in 1991). The funny thing about these systems is that nobody uses them, which I can only take to mean that most people don't seem to really care much about their privacy.

An email tax -- as part of a broader Internet tax -- could raise money to help keep the Postal Service afloat, Wozniak told the council.

Keep the Postal Service afloat? Why? People aren't using it. It does not provide a service or product that people need or want. Nor does it reliably or conveniently provide the services and products that people do want.

People have chosen other means of paying bills, getting solicitations, and corresponding with each other.

If people wanted to keep the Postal Service afloat, they'd mail letters and bills, request catalogs, and purchase stamps and PO Boxes.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads." This was to facilitate interstate commerce and communication. Since each state under the Articles of Confederation issued its own stamps, sending a letter across states lines required multiple stamps and was a bureaucratic nightmare.

Just as electronic banking and wire transfers have all but eliminated the need for clearing houses to process checks and money orders, the Internet and telephone networks currently in place facilitate communication much more readily and immediately.

Congress can still comply with its mandate "To establish Post Offices and post Roads" by empowering private companies to carry the remaining postal burden and ensure equity of service through laws and regulations.

The romance of Ben Franklin's "appointed couriers" died around the time postal carriers started getting paid six-figures to hide sacks of mail in their closets; and people realized that e-mail was not only more immediate, it was more reliable.

Taxing e-mail is just another cash grab by the government. And, like the other taxes that were going to wire us into the 21st century, the money won't pay for nationwide free wifi, it will end up in the union-mandated pension fund of the guys who have been hiding our mail in their closets.

Better we pay FedEx and UPS to deliver letters and packages, Comcast and AT&T for our phones and Internet, and shop online than we submit to an e-mail tax to prop up an aging monopoly that is rapidly outliving its utility to society.

And when someone figures out how to provide nationwide free wifi profitably, we'll have that too.

"It's not going to cost us anything non-negligible, and yet SOMEHOW it's simultaneously going to come up with enough revenue to 'blanket the country with Wifi'. From where, the Wifi fairy?"

It's the Scrooge McDuck Money Bin fallacy, which seems to be widespread now. The fallacy goes that, somewhere out there, there is a person or small group of people who have an essentially infinite amount of money hidden away somewhere. And if only we could find it, we could take out enough money to pay for everything we would ever want. And even this amount would be such a tiny percentage of the total money in the bin that the bin owners would never notice the difference.

So paying for everything we want would cause no harm or inconvenience to the money bin owners whatsoever. They keep the money bin hidden from us solely because they're selfish, greedy, insensitive, and just plain mean. Therefore, since they won't tell us where the money bin is, its owners deserve to have the crap taxed out of them. Serves them right.

A lot of people simply cannot accept the idea that there is no Scrooge McDuck Money Bin. They seem incapable of the thought processes that are involved in actually understanding basic economics. Their thinking is to spend money now, because eventually the money bin will be found, and when it is, its contents will repay all debts.

Whereas with a letter, there is an expectation of privacy, other people can't read your mail.

Unless they violate the law, that is...

***

That's right, IRA. People can always violate the law if they want to, but then they can be prosecuted for it.

Lobster, the difference would be the USPS has name brand recognition, and would have nice GUIs for those who need them.