The Irish Times - Thursday, June 16, 2011Taxing text messages
Madam, – Hats off to Michael Noonan for refusing to consider Aodhán Ó Ríordáin’s text message tax proposal (Home News, June 13th). SMS messages are almost unimaginably overpriced as it is. A single SMS, which is after all just a small packet of data, is limited to 160 7-bit characters, or 140 bytes. At 13 cents a text, this works out at over €970 a megabyte. If all data transmission were charged at this rate, it would cost almost €10,000 to watch a five-minute video on YouTube. If more people knew this, perhaps they would be less inclined to participate in the phone networks’ multibillion euro text messaging rip-off.
With the ever-increasing availability of entry-level phones with access to the internet (at rates altogether more reasonable than text messaging’s €970/Mb), coupled with the ability to use e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Skype or any number of other services to send messages to anyone in the world with a similarly capable phone for no extra charge, it can’t be long before the 20-year-old SMS system is consigned to the scrapheap. I suspect a tax on each message, aside from being an obvious instance of regressive taxation, would only hasten this process.
We undoubtedly need to raise more money for the exchequer. Perhaps this might better be done by properly collecting existing taxes, rather than imposing technologically and economically dubious new ones? When it comes to such proposals, there is a big difference between thinking outside the box, and saying whatever comes into your head. – Yours, etc,
TOM FLYNN,
Marchmont Road,
Edinburgh.
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