New Reality Seeds

[DocRailgun]

A penny per email isn't going to change people's email habits that much. What it will do is reduce the use of spam emails as marketing. That would be good for the Internet. The 'net will become a much more regulated place, though, as the need to be able to charge people for posts and emails will require ISPs to be looking at everything that gets sent and to who. So, there's unlikely to be as much fraud, child pornography, illegal drug sales, and so on. All in all this seems like it would be a good thing. If it changes people's habits, it will be to make them write emails more like letters they would write on paper and send through the post, to get the most for their money. There minidisc/thumbdrive/SD card/etc. industry might be even more stimulated as people start recording video/audio/letters/so on through dedicated devices and sending them on media through the physical post.

The video game industry is likely to continue to be stimulated, though if a game is taxed there might not be game networks for consoles. There's no reason for computer technology to lag behind a work with no tax - the money can be used to improve the Internet's infrastructure so everyone has yottabit fiber connections even in the rural areas of countries with these taxes.

There may well be ISPs that cut deals with the government to pay a chunk of money up front and then their subscribers have unlimited or a large block of them that is cheaper than "retail" every month.

All this tax would do is cause people to think about what they write and post rather than shoot off a Tweet every five seconds or Instrgram everything they eat. The "Internet" would be used at least as much for entertainment. They're still going to stay in contact with one another but instead of everyone having their heads down in their phones texting they'll be making long video calls and having long conversations like they did on landlines before texting and emails became popular.

Taxes don't stop people from doing things. Maybe they discourage people from starting - high taxes on cigarettes and alcohol in the US prove that. High gasoline taxes don't stop people from driving SUVs. taxing pronography wouldn't change the use of that much.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Penny-1

In Penny-1, the US government decided to charge a telecommunications tax of $0.01 per email ($0.001 per internet posting) to internet service providers in 1993 (it was quickly followed by similar taxes in Europe and Japan in 1994 and the rest of the world by 1995). Internet service providers passed the cost of the telecommunications tax to their customers and, without relatively free email and internet postings, the internet primarily remained the province of academia and social media never developed beyond the old style BBS. While there are internet companies that provide specialized services, the added cost of communication means that the majority of people only use them when they cannot find local suppliers.