Email Tax?

Market failure has been much in the news of late, but one notable breakdown has attracted little attention: spam. Some 200bn junk emails are sent daily. More than 40bn come from the US and Canada, and about 6bn from Britain. Estimates vary, but the best guess is that more than 90 per cent of all email is spam.What causes this stupefying supply for which there is no apparent demand? The answer is simple: sending an email is free. Yet billions of junk messages take a toll in complex and haphazard spam filters, productivity losses and misuse of increasingly crowded bandwidth. Spam is used to spread viruses and sell fake or fraudulent goods. Moreover, there is an increasing risk that spam will make legitimate email a form of second-class post. Internet service providers (ISPs) have proposed price mechanisms to control it, but users objected. The time has come for a public sector remedy: a tax, perhaps no more than 2p, or 3c, on every email sent. Opponents will argue that collecting the tax is impossible or unfair. Yet the status quo is unworkable. Since early 2007 the global volume of spam has more than trebled. To stop this blizzard of unwanted messages, ISPs and most large businesses spend a sizeable chunk of their IT budget filtering out obvious junk. Despite this, most of us spend time each day clicking “delete”—and the deluge is getting worse. A unit tax on email would stop most spam. A peddler sending 1m messages a day hawking cross-border pharmaceuticals, for instance, would have to balance the uncertain revenues against the tax cost of £100,000 or $150,000 a week. Trying to con people out of money or their bank password would become a risky gamble.