“Since many billions of emails are sent every day, an email tax could raise substantial sums,” Gordon said. “Most of the revenue raised could be used to fund the managing and maintaining [of] the Internet Superhighway and a portion to subsidize snail mail. Think of it as analogous to the gas tax used to maintain our physical highways.”

That might have been the end of it, except that this Sunday, Los Angeles Times political columnist George Skelton picked up on the idea—and gave it a ringing endorsement. Fighting for an e-mail tax is a "battle worth waging," Skelton wrote. He concluded by suggesting that an e-mail tax could not only raise money, but would help fight "spammers and scammers."

Wozniak acknowledged an e-mail tax was going nowhere as a local measure, though, as such a tax was banned by Congress in 1998.

Fox suggests Wozniak's idea "is not as new, or perhaps as far-fetched, as it sounds." After all, the Internet Tax Freedom Act is set to expire this year, and "government could one day turn to the Internet for a new-age funding stream." But the piece acknowledges the likelihood of an e-mail tax being taken seriously is "slim."

The idea of an Internet or e-mail tax has been floated around practically since the beginning of the Internet. Urban-legend site Snopes has records of "e-mail tax" scams going back to at least 1999.

-- exerpts from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/is-the-government-going-to-tax-your-e-mail-only-on-fox/

First of all, how do you access email... oh wait, through the Internet! Second of all the internet IS a peer-to-peer network, just with ISPs which tell you which domain names match up to which IP adresses. If you want to start your own network fine, but remember that you have to have a way to find out how to get to other websites.

thirdly, why are you quoting from a website which says that an email tax is not going to happen

1-2 email is over the internet which is peer-to-peer - this is semantics. when i say 'internet' i mean a nework communicating from one ip address to another. so a network of ip addresses. email, on the other hand is communicating from one email address to another. so if they decide for 'security' or any other bs reason to prevent direct ip communications between computers, people will still be able to email each other, presumably.

what they want is 2-internets. or 1-internet corporate-owned. there will always be the giant corporate sites that will be able to communicate with people at high bandwidth etc. even if they do things to make it hard for people to communicate directly to each other over ip. so as they try to move to this, at least the email network can remain.

finally just using ip's is not good enough i would argue. because you may use multiple computers, possibly shared computers, etc, and you want to be able to access your network from other computers. or what if you move or your isp decides to change your ip? you need your network to last beyond these things.

im sure there are more points on this... but this message is getting long.

3. the article says the email tax will not happen in the near future - yes. i agree. however, it would argue that the article still demonstrates a desire by the elites to create one. but they are being realistic and know it will take years of conditioning the public before they can start moving it in.

Yes but you only access email via gmail or yahoo etc which is over the INTERNET.

oh actually one final point on 1-2 - internet is NOT peer-to-peer in practice, even though it could be in theory. people could be constantly connecting to their friends computers over ip. but they are not. but people ARE sending emails to their friends. so in order to make a peer-to-peer network over ip you would need to bootstrap one, create one, where there is none presently. and since there is no network there currently it is much easier for them to prevent one from being created. it is much harder for them to go in and dismantle an existing network like email.

i think your confusion comes from the same place as other users like i forget who draugner or something thinking that there is no threat whatsoever to internet freedom. they have some magical idyllic view everything in this over-simplistic black and white world. where the only way they can restrict internet is via a giant red button that shuts everything down at once. they dont understand how control over other media streams such as radio were accomplished, and their opinions of what a free internet is will likely change over time so by the time their children are their age they will accept less internet freedom and think again that it is crazy to talk about restrictions on the internet because 'it will never happen'.

a lot of people have such over simplistic views on things that they dont see the changes that happen. 'oh sure this tax is fine it helps the internet by adding revenue' or 'creating a government regulation to throttle p2p bandwidth is perfectly fine, those p2p communications are typically illegal or spam anyway' or 'auctioning off rights to ips to corporations is a good idea, its the free market solution, as we auction off rights to radio waves now' etc etc. all the elites have to do is move to a system where few people will be effected by a change, and then put that change in.

if there is one strategy the elites use it is oversimplifying problems to black and white issues. and then sneaking in changes that are small enough to fit more into the 'white' side of the issue.

so nobody else has an opinion or suggestion for this? ok let me give you another one - taxis. you can have a free system where people give each other rides, then maybe people can start charging for rides. maybe at the start there are tons of people working independently as kind of taxis. but then with the system we have that subsidizes giant companies, some big companies in the industry get some power. they leverage that power to put in regulations and get tax breaks to get even more market domination. (right now the internet has few regulations so it is more the tax benefits like facebook paying no tax). once they gain really strong market domination they can even get the government to say 'sorry people only a few taxi companies will be allowed to operate and we will decide which ones' and then you get the medallion system. but the media is busy talking about something else so few of the general public even notice or are bothered by what is happening.

Suggestion: Learn the technical details before spouting off.

Opinion: You haven't learned not to start additional threads so that people who want to mute you can do so easily.

further information - note that this email network idea does not depend on 'http', that is, the internet as it currently exists. have you heard of 'netsukuku'? it is an alternative to the internet that uses wifi to create a mesh network.

now if netsukuku is popularized, then you could have [email protected] - this is email that is not over ip. you could even, in theory, have email sent from [email protected] to [email protected] as long as pesl.byethost7.com has a connection to the netsukuku network.

Anyone remembering fido.net?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

fidonet seems a little bit centralized. but it reminds me of usenet. does anyone remember that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

does the 'internet restrictions will never be implemented' realize that usenet was essentially shut down by a combination of isps and the dmca? sidenote does this crowd realize cispa just passed the house as we were distracted by the recent terrorist incidents? do they know that in spite of masses of people protesting it, they just kept pushing it until it went through against the majority of the public being strongly opposed to it?

http://www.zdnet.com/cispa-passes-u-s-house-death-of-the-fourth-amendment-7000014205/

according to your article, the reason usenet was shutdown was because noone was using it except for porn

the real reason it was shut down was because it was a communication network outside of centralized control. but yes, they did convince politicians with a variety of excuses from intellectual property to child porn to terrorism. and these same excuses will be used as they transition the internet to a system where it is either restricted or not economically feasible to have an independent website and people are forced into only using accounts on major websites rather than having their own.

convergence of my two threads!
facebook and tumbler and other websites are RIGHT NOW blocking images and links that threaten the corporate media narrative on the boston bombings. such as images of those craft international agents at the race, or images of the two brothers showing they had good lives and were unlikely to want to throw it away with a bombing like this. i hope you all are aware of this.

You do realize that if you wanted to, you could just manually connect to everything by ip don't you? Also, governments have no direct control over the Internet. All they can do is arrest people if they do anything. They could do the same no matter what system exists.

RFC 2549 already solves this problem. Next spam thread?

only a few of you seem to understand the problem.

do you also know that you could just get your friend to give you a ride and then pay him? or you could build anything on your property and damn the zoning laws? therefore restricting cab licenses or creating restrictive zoning laws have not restricted out freedoms at all!

genius.

... Until a series of wireless hubs is created for peer to peer linkages, access to the internet is still dependant on access to satellites and cable infrastructure.

Even if hubs of wireless local networks do appear, to connect from hub to hub will require larger projecting arrays. Which are not inexpensive.

Suffice to say if governments wanted to regulate control of the internet all that would be required is the cooperation, or taking the infrastructural assets the internet relies on. Email net is hardly a solution.

While mesh nets are cool, and have potential. You should feel pretty foolish for suggesting email nets as the solution, without addressing infrastructural needs.

tldr; Your solution is useless because it relies on the same infrastructure as the internet.

i think the oposite, that it is useful precisely because it uses the same infrastructure. if it tried to create a new infrastructure then the government would be able to easily shut it down. for example, usenet was a different protocol and hence they easily shut it down. but shutting down email is going to be harder.

and what you are not realizing is that this control is not some nebulous theory, control is already being exerted and the transition from decentralized to a centralized internet has been happening ever since the internet became popular. usenet is just one example. but the traffic that major hubs like facebook get now compared to the traffic small websites get is going in one direction - toward centralization. and websites are blocked and shut down by the government for one reason or another.

again, it is not black and white. i am not talking about a giant red button obama hits to close the internet. i am talking about small changes to move the internet away from freedom. changes which are happening now.

Yes. Usenet used a different protocol, but it still required the support of the self same internet/telecom providers.

As long as you are using those telecom providers there will be centralized means of control. Regardless of if we use your email system or not.

For a true peer to peer network, with distributed control a different infrastructure is required, (see the mesh net project for details on one potential model) because so long as you are using centralized infrastructure, rather than distributed there will always be a means for control.

In your email system, what stops the government from demanding google filter emails/content according the US law, and shutting them down if they don't.

Its a slightly ridiculous concept, but that kind of control could happen, and the only way to prevent that, is a distributed network, with localized nodes.

Do I think any of this is likely to be a problem?

No.

But if we are talking means to bypass centralized control, at least lets make it a conversation about a system that works.

yes maybe. but that is assuming that they can easily distinguish regular emails from emails on this 'network' and then selectively close email accounts that look to be networking too much or something. and it would seem a lot harder technically for them to convince the public as to why they are closing down these certain email accounts. maybe. i do see your point. a mesh network would be great but they could try to shut them down like how they shut down pirate radio. and it requires a lot of people to get involved at once. so that is why the mesh network may be difficult to get off the ground.

my guess is that people here didnt care or notice that usenet was shut down because it is something they dont use. so if a mesh network is gaining popularity and is shut down then maybe the television masses will also not care or notice because they never used one.

but closing email accounts because they are members of some group that likes to regularly email each other and are in some networks... well since everyone here has probably used email, that might get their attention more, maybe? or maybe i am being too hopeful.

ISPs are pretty excellent at monitoring traffic, and many of them find ways to restrict specific activity that they find damaging to their bottom line. See the whole torrent throttling of a few years back.

Additionally companies like google have been forced to provide private emails upon request: http://poorrichardsnews.com/post/43732725012/google-releases-thousands-of-private-emails-to

So if you think monitoring email and filtering ingoing-outgoing mail would be hard, think again.

As for mesh nets being impractical. They really are. Which is one reason I don't worry about it, what we have now is fine, and as useful as the internet is, I could live without it.

But hey, meshnets don't have to be adopted all at once. They can start small and continuously grow. That doesn't change the problem of the government trying to shut them down. However because everything is distributed across many hubs they are much harder to shut down, than a radio broadcast, which is being broadcast from a location, than a mesh net where each hub talks to all the surrounding hubs.

Closing email accounts isn't the only control solution. A truly paranoid government could impose filters, so emails with certain content never arrived.