Feb 09 2006
Taxing Email
AOL, Yahoo To Impose Private Tax on Email
This is a stupid, anti-customer plan, and I can only hope that they aren’t powerful enough to subvert the natural market economics that will teach them how stupid a plan it is to treat your customers like criminals.
Popularity: 4% [?]
I’d love to know how they plan to implement it. Unless the sender has one of their accounts, they can’t really deal with when the message is being created. Otherwise, by the time they get the email, its to late to ask the sender to pay the tax, and no good way of enforcing it. So unless they get every single SMTP server on the same page, there’s no way to get it universally enforceable. And ignoring the unfeasability of that, you still have to deal with trying to not tax for each jump in the chain, and only when the person sends the email. But the protocol isn’t very good at distinguishing how far done the chain you are.
I just figured out how something like it could be implemented. When an email hits their servers, it checks to see if the From address header is on the “whitelist”. If so, it marks them as having sent an email and they get charged a tax. Otherwise, it sends it through the normal filters, probably catches it as spam. It probably also generates an automatic reply to the sender informing them of the “opportunity” if they would only be willing to spend the fee. And of course there will be a link on their sites providing people the chance to sign up for this service. Don’t think it’ll necessarily reduce spam, although at least with the ones on the “whitelist” we’ll know who they are.
Keep in mind, though, that open source has already generated that kind of whitelisting: the “Sender Permitted From” framework/”Sender Policy Framework”.
I just thought of something. From a business standpoint, AOL’s target platform is bug-ridden, highly insecure Windows boxes. Given that, how long is it going to be before one of them gets some kind of virus which proceeds to bombard the entire internet with spam? And seeing as how computers can easilly generate thousands of emails a second, how big is that bill going to be?
Hell, from a purely cold profit-monger standpoint, it’s actually in AOL’s best interest for those kinds of viruses to spread if this plan were to be implemented.