EU Considering SMS, Email Tax

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:

The European Union is investigating possible taxes on emails and SMS messages as a new source of funds for the 25 member bloc. A European Parliament working group, headed by Alain Lamassoure, a prominent French MEP, is doing the investigation. Initial proposals are to add a tax of around 1.5 cents on text or SMS messages and a 0.00001 cent levy on every email sent.

“This is peanuts, but given the billions of transactions every day, this could still raise an immense income,” he said.

In Italy, the concept of a tax on texting was floated in the past, as a way to help offset the country’s huge deficit, although it was flatly rejected by the outgoing government. [Source: Reuters via Yahoo! News UK]

We Say: Questions still open: who pays… sender, receiver? Both? What about emails or even text messages sent from outside the EU? How will it be collected? And here’s a big one: what about spam, which constitutes more email than legitimate messages? Well, as they say, nothing is certain but death and taxes… even when messaging, it seems.

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