Free Republic

Earlier this week, readers reacted with skepticism after Berkeley City Councilman Gordon Wozniak suggested that taxing email might be one way to raise money for the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service. … But there’s a history to this idea, however outlandish as it might sound to some. The United Nations Development Program examined such a tax in its 1999 Human Development Report, Globalization With a Human Face, as a way to fund “the global communications revolution.” UNDP calculated that in 1996, such a tax would have raised $70 billion globally. The New York Times took a brief look at the concept...

NEW YORK Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers. America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from a quarter of a cent to 1 cent each to have them delivered.....

<p>One of the more enduring Internet hoaxes is the chain letter claiming that the government has an e-mail tax in the works. Well, if Congress doesn't extend the Internet tax moratorium before it expires at the end of this week, the e-mail tax could soon cease to be an urban legend.</p>