Creeva’s World 2.0

Arti­cle Date 3–1-00

This mes­sage was for­warded to me

>In a mes­sage dated 02/27/2000 6:47:22 PM Cen­tral Stan­dard Time,
kirkwoods@innernet.net writes:

EMAIL.……

CNN has reported that within the next two weeks Con­gress is going to vote on allow­ing tele­phone com­pa­nies to CHARGE A TOLL FEE for Inter­net
access.

Trans­la­tion: Every time we send a long dis­tance e-mail we will receive a long dis­tance charge. This will get costly. Please visit the fol­low­ing web site and file a com­plaint. Com­plain to your Con­gressper­son. We can’t allow this to pass! The fol­low­ing address will
allow you to send an e-mail on this sub­ject DIRECTLY to your Con­gressper­son. http://www.house.gov/writerep

Pass this on to your friends. It is urgent. I hope all of you will pass this on to all your friends and fam­ily. We should ALL have an inter­est in this one. WAIT, THERE’S MORE. IN ADDITION, The last few months have revealed an alarm­ing trend in the Gov­ern­ment of the United States attempt­ing to qui­etly push through leg­is­la­tion that will affect your use of the Inter­net. Under pro­posed leg­is­la­tion the US Postal Ser­vice will be attempt­ing to bilk email users out of alter­nate postage fees.” Bill 602P will per­mit the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment to charge a 5 cent sur­charge on every email deliv­ered, by billing Inter­net Ser­vice Providers at source. The con­sumer would then be billed in turn by the ISP. Wash­ing­ton D.C. lawyer Richard Stepp is work­ing with­out pay to pre­vent this leg­is­la­tion from becom­ing law. The U.S. Postal Ser­vice is claim­ing that lost rev­enue due to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of e-mail cost­ing nearly $230,000,000 in rev­enue per year. You may
have noticed their recent ad cam­paign “There is noth­ing like a let­ter”. Since the aver­age cit­i­zen received about 10 pieces of email per day in 1998, the cost to the typ­i­cal indi­vid­ual would be an addi­tional
50 cents per day, or over $180 dol­lars per year, above and beyond their reg­u­lar Inter­net costs. Note that this would be money paid directly to the U.S. Postal
Ser­vice for a ser­vice they do not even pro­vide. The whole point of the Inter­net is democ­racy and non-interference. If the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is per­mit­ted to tam­per with our lib­er­ties by adding a
sur­charge to email, who knows where it will end. You are already pay­ing an exor­bi­tant price for snail mail because of bureau­cratic inef­fi­ciency. It cur­rently takes up to 6 days for a let­ter to be deliv­ered from New York to Buf­falo. If the U.S. Postal Ser­vice is allowed to tin­ker with email, it will mark the end of the “free” Inter­net in the United States. One con­gress­man, Tony
Schnell has even sug­gested a “twenty to forty dol­lar per month sur­charge on all Inter­net ser­vice” above and beyond the government’s pro­posed email charges. Note that most of the major news­pa­pers have
ignored the story, the only excep­tion being the Wash­ing­ton­ian which called the idea of email sur­charge “a use­ful con­cept who’s time has come” (March 6th,1999)

Edi­to­r­ial. Don’t sit by and watch your free­doms erode away! Send this e-mail to EVERYONE on your list, and tell all your friends and rel­a­tives to write to their Con­gress­man and say “No!” to Bill 602P.

It will only take a few moments of your time, and could very well be instru­men­tal in killing a bill we don’t want.

PASS THIS ON TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW WHO USES EMAIL

REMEMBER THESE ARE TWO SEPARATE ISSUES THAT EFFECT ALL OF US ONLINE.

LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD NOW, NOT
AFTER!!!!!!

END Mes­sage

********************************

Now read my imme­di­ate response.

First off this would be impos­si­ble to imple­ment if you take into effect the cur­rent infra­struc­ture of the inter­net. This mes­sage has always been a hoax since I’ve been using the inter­net the past 6 years. Let’s look at some major points involved.

1. How can the phone com­pany know that you are send­ing long dis­tance e-mail from a ser­vice such as hot­mail, yahoo, mytalk etc. These com­pa­nies express the right to pri­vacy and would not tell the phone com­pany who you emailed and where.

2. If CNN reported this why is not big news. The inter­net cen­sor­ship at of 1997 was huge and the pub­lic had it later repealed after a year of peti­tion­ing and a bill such as this would be much big­ger. The rea­son is CNN reported no such thing and no such law is in effect.

3. The gov­ern­ment just passed a law this year keep­ing inter­net sales and com­merce tax free to enhance the growth of the inter­net infra­struc­ture, a law such as this one would ruin all of the work the World Trade Orga­ni­za­tion just did. This is another proof that it is a false claim.

4. Tele­phone com­pa­nies would love this type of law to be passed because of miss­ing rev­enues they are los­ing. Such inter­net site such as www.dialpad.com allow you to make long dis­tance phone calls for free. Mul­ti­ple inter­net soft­ware pack­ages allow you to talk like a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion over the inter­net for free. Why would they go after e-mail when this hurts them more directly.

5. Due to dereg­u­la­tion of the phone com­mis­sion any com­pany such as your cable com­pany or even pri­vate enter­prise has the right to offer tele­phone ser­vice to any indi­vid­ual at areas where it is offered. Under these Con­di­tions who gets the money.

6. Your local phone com­pany and you ISP is not allowed to check what sort of data you send from your machine. THIS IS AN INVASION OF PRIVACY. Check you terms of agree­ment you had for your ISP and if they have vio­lated this you have a major law­suit on your hands. Hence they do not know where your e-mail is com­ing from either.

7. Finally who is going to track and fig­ure out the cost of the nearly 2.5 bil­lion e-mail mes­sages sent each day to fig­ure out the tax. The cost alone of set­ting this up would cost bil­lions and would not be finan­cially sound because it is not elec­tron­i­cally feasible.

8. It would just be bla­tantly stupid.

For­ward this response to every­one that sent you the orig­i­nal mes­sage and tell them they are igno­rant to inter­net fea­si­bil­ity for believ­ing it, but then you never believed it any­way did you?

If any­one else has any soft­ware, inter­net, com­puter, or elec­tronic age ques­tions you can e-mail me at bgueth@mytalk.com

Sin­cerely

Brent Matthew Gueth

Since this mes­sage I have done some research just to make sure I was not wrong. I wasn’t. Hear what the Toronto Post said when the same scam went around Canada last year. The arti­cle is linked here