TAX on your E-Mail?

[TVC_NickUK]

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...f-deficit.html

"Bob Crow: email should be taxed to pay off deficit
Bob Crow, the Left-wing trade union leader, has suggested that emails should be subject to taxes in order to pay off the deficit.

was booed as he outlined his idea for a 1p tax on each email during an appearance on a late night comedy show.
He said that rather than cutting public services, the Government should tax email traffic and scrap the replacement for the Trident nuclear defence system.
Asked for his strategy for protecting jobs while tackling the deficit, Mr Crow told Channel 4’s 10 O’clock Live Show: “If groups of workers are under attack, we believe we should coordinate and stand firm - propose a tax of 1p per email, and get rid of Trident.”

I think not, I don't want to even pay £0.01 extra on something we already pay an excessive amount for broadband and not even getting the speeds we should I know it's improving some what but still that's such a stupid thing to suggest when the infrastructure in the UK for Broadband is lacking some what to the standard speeds in countries like Sweden which have 100Mbit and their upstream is faster than what most UK Customers have as their Download Speed. A friend of mine she has 100Mbit Down / 10Mbit up and with a simple phone call she can get her Upload Speed upgraded for so little at that it's cheaper.

Also would it be possible to Tax people using services that arn't based in UK as this would cause a flood of new E-Mail providers hosting servers outside of the UK if that outside of Europe to make it Tax-Free E-Mails? How would they tell that you've been sending an E-Mail without looking at the packets you're sending which is possible but I'd go as far as saying a little privacy here?

[TVC_H4U]

Email costs £0, so if we tax email at say VAT rate of 20%. That means for every email you will be Taxed £0. Here is my maths:
EMAIL QUANTITY (times) EMAIL PRICE (plus) 20% (equals) £0

Thank god its a comedy programme.

[gazza-911]

It isn't VAT as you don't buy a commercial product, tax is addition the current price (which is free). To do this, the governernment would need to either: have the coorparation of ISP's, obtain live-feed records from mail services (a lot of data), set up something to monitor it (costing money). The biggest problem though is, even with the data, how is an email associated to a particular household if people use VPN's/Proxies, what if people use disposable emails which require no registration or ip record, what happens to businesses were the user has the option of having reports sent to their email on a daily basis.

[heyadrian]

This is just plain old silly! What about the poor OAP's who can't really get out of home who rely on the internet and email to keep them company.

Oh yeah, and who exactly is going to monitor the email going out og houses of parliament/goverment etc... I smell another "expenses claim" scandal on the way lol...

They'll start taxing us on our turds just now if we don't watch it >.>

[37408]

bob bloody crow wants to stick with the railways and getting THEM sorted out and stop trying to get us to pay per email.