I heard this news a few days ago and I am still having a hard time believing this might happen. EU is seriously considering on adding a tax for e-mail and SMS-messages. The proposed tax would be 1.5 cents on every text/SMS-message and 0.00001 cent on every e-mail sent.

We are talking peanut money per person here, but I think this is done for the wrong reasons

But Lamassoure argues that with billions of e-mails and texts sent around the world, it’s a novel and simple way to raise funds from new technology.

“Exchanges between countries have ballooned, so everyone would understand that the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU,” he said

To tax something just because it would be a good source of income… sounds a highly politic decision…

I also dislike the idea it places service and paid content providers. For example you want to read a specific paid magazine article, but you need to buy the access code using SMS-message. When doing the order, tax would be charged once. When the applications sends you an return SMS-message, tax would be charged second time. This means that additional 3 cents per order needs to placed somewhere - does the user pay the bill, or service provider?

And when moving to area of automated applications things get interesting. Take for example blogs or forums; both can send email notifications and even SMS-message notifications are not unheard of. For large and highly active services this can mean millions of notifications send annually - who will pay the tax? Service provider or users?

Read the full story at ZDNet.