8 Comments

Europe looking to tax EMail’s and SMS messages

May 29, 2006 by in Stupid,Tech with 8 Comments

The European Union is investigating possible taxes on emails and SMS messages as a new source of funds. Initial proposals are to add a tax of around 1.5 cents on text or SMS messages and a 0.00001 cent levy on every email sent.

Questions still open: who pays … sender, receiver? Both? What about emails or even text messages sent from outside the EU? How will it be collected? And here’s a big one � what about spam, which constitutes more email than legitimate messages? Well, as they say, nothing is certain but death and taxes … even when messaging, it seems.

Seems like a horrible idea!

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  • josh

    i bet the sender pays the bill. they’ll probably have some sort of id number attached to emails that flow through special servers or get tracked by isp’s and the records get handed over.

    in the lifespan of my gmail acct i have racked up 1,181 emails over the past couple of years. that only amonts to $0.01181 cents. taxing emails hardly sound effective for raising money. the tax would have to be $0.02 cents ($23.62 over 2 years) or something.

    the whole idea sound shi**y to me.

  • Jamie

    Why does everything bad happen to us Europeans?

  • hoodoo

    Anyone ever hear of an urban legend? It seems like only yesterday when the USPS had to issue a press release denying that they were enacting this “tax.”

  • ClaMs

    Na I doubt this would hold any ground. First of all there’s a law which prohibits the taxation on communiations such as satelites and ariels.

    Secondly, there’s the French, and they don’t take shit from anybody. Surely they’ll put a stop to it.

  • Roy

    The way I see it, the government is researching ways to collect money [taxes] from us. They’ll first pass this tax because it’s soooo low, but I’m sure they’ll start raising the tax until we [the users] complain.

  • Mark

    Isnt taxed supposed to be based off some sort of use that the government provides? How is this anything they provide? This is why when the USPS tried to tax emails they failed, because they contribute nothing to the service.

  • ClaMs

    It won’t pass. The restriction (minor or not) of such telecomunications would be a drastic blow to the EU’s telecomunication progress, and let alone public relations. Having an icrease of 1.5c would almost make our SMSes 50% more costly, meaning we’d start sending 33% less messages – God forbid.

    This would even mean that certain sites would remove the ‘email to friend’ function.

    Anyway surely people would find a way around it. Maybe a sort of emailing system that uses a different protocol to POP3 or whatever we use. IM clients would certainly become more popular.

    What if I have a virus and it keeps sending false emails off my computer? Would I have to pay for those? What about emailing from a website such as gmail or yahoo and not Outlook? How can they track those? What if the site is American? Surely the EU can’t charge me for using a service from the US!

    Tracking all those emails would certainly cost more then the revenue they bring in:

    “Sir, I’ve managed to capture 100,000 emails that were going to by pass our system!”
    “Good job lad! That means the EU is 1c richer thanks to you! Here’s your paycheck!”

  • hoodoo

    Again, the USPS never “tried to tax emails” dumbass. Check your facts.

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