[Hotfoot]

Two words: Cow Pies.

The government can't charge for emails, and if they even tried, I wish them good luck on trying to figure out just which packets are e-mail, which are instant Messages, which are GET and POST commands from webservers, which are message Boards, and which are multiplayer games. And what about lost packets? Would they tax those too? They take up bandwidth, but never reach their destination.

It might sound plausible to tax the internet like that, but unless the government COMPLETELY changes the way the net is structured and how it functions, it's not going to happen. And since the net is international, they would have to coerce EVERY major internet-using goverment into going along with these changes, or risk essentially creating an national intranet out of America's current internet.

The concern about keeping the net relatively free, however, is a legitimate one. We could go back to paying by how many hours or minutes we spend Online, or maybe even by how many packets are successfully transferred. And the net could become regulated by censor after censor. I don't know how many of you follow Everquest, but a while back there was a player who was Banned from the game for writing and posting fan-fiction that many people considered to be offensive (it involved slavery and torture). While we don't pay for play here like on Everquest, the nature of these forums could be made (and I'm not saying they will ever be) so that anyone posting such sick ideas as a genocidal war and glorifying it in fiction will be Banned, their Posts deleted, and their parents emailed on the subject.

Anyway, it's all a question of control or freedom. Freedom leads to chaos, control leads to stagnation. We have to decide upon a middle ground that works for everyone.

-Hotfoot
"Serious concepts, realized in fantasy."