Congress wants e-mail tax

The era of tax-free e-mail, Internet shopping and broadband connections could end soon, if recent proposals in the US Congress prove successful, reports News.com.

State and local governments this week resumed a push to lobby Congress for far-reaching changes on two different fronts: gaining the ability to impose sales taxes on Net shopping, and being able to levy new monthly taxes on DSL and other connections. One senator is even predicting taxes on e-mail.

At the moment, federal law frequently bars states and municipalities from collecting both access and sales taxes. However, they hope their new lobbying effort, coordinated by groups including the National Governors Association, will pay off by permitting them to collect billions of dollars in new revenue by next year.

The cost of making mobile phone calls in Europe is set to fall substantially after lawmakers backed plans to cap roaming charges, reports BBC News.

The amount mobile customers are charged by local phone operators for using their handsets while abroad should now fall by as much as 75%. More than 150 million people across Europe will be affected by the changes in the pricing regime.

The changes still need to be approved by the member governments of the 27-nation bloc, although these approvals are considered a formality. The new charges are unlikely to come into effect until later this year.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has tried and failed to develop spectrum auctions that allow start-up companies to get into the mobile service provider industry, but now Google thinks it has a better idea, reports PC World.

In a filing made to the FCC on Monday, Google proposes a spectrum policy that allows would-be service providers to bid real-time in an auction for the right to use a piece of spectrum for a given period of time in order to deliver services to phones or other devices.

The auction system could be similar to AdWords, the system Google offers to companies that bid against each other to have their ads displayed online when users search for certain terms.

The Internet Engineering Task Force has granted preliminary approval to the DomainKeys Identified Mail, reports IT Week.

The industry standard promises to curb spam e-mail by preventing spammers spoofing, the practice of forging the sender's e-mail address to make it appear like the message originated from a reputable company instead of some shady offshore spammer.

DomainKeys attaches an encrypted digital signature unique to the sender to each e-mail message when it is sent. A message where the sender's address doesn't match the signature can be discarded as spam.