Fox News is known for its conservative viewpoint on a variety of issues, and that includes being anti-tax. So it's no surprise that a Fox reporter, having heard tell of an e-mail tax, of all things, being proposed in the famously liberal city of Berkeley, of all places, would eagerly jump on the news.

But today's front-page Fox story, which suggests a Berkeley city councilman's offhanded comment is breathing "new life" into the idea of an Internet tax, is overblown.

The inflating “e-mail tax” story

The story started with routine coverage of a Berkeley City Council meeting by local news blog Berkeleyside. Buried in the 11th paragraph of that story, an unnamed councilperson suggests "a very tiny tax" on e-mail as a way to get additional funding for a historic downtown Post Office.

Readers' reactions were very negative. A Berkeleyside Twitter follower called the idea “unworkable insanity.” Another wrote: “This is just insane. Does the esteemed councilman have the first clue how the Internet works?”

Those reactions sparked a follow-up story that focused on the Berkeley Councilman who made the proposal, Gordon Wozniak.

“Since many billions of emails are sent every day, an email tax could raise substantial sums,” Gordon said. “Most of the revenue raised could be used to fund the managing and maintaining [of] the Internet Superhighway and a portion to subsidize snail mail. Think of it as analogous to the gas tax used to maintain our physical highways.”

Wozniak acknowledged an e-mail tax was going nowhere as a local measure, though, as such a tax was banned by Congress in 1998.

That might have been the end of it, except that this Sunday, Los Angeles Times political columnist George Skelton picked up on the idea—and gave it a ringing endorsement. Fighting for an e-mail tax is a "battle worth waging," Skelton wrote. He concluded by suggesting that an e-mail tax could not only raise money, but would help fight "spammers and scammers."

That's unlikely for both legal and technical reasons. The earlier Berkeleyside piece quotes a saner voice on the issue, Harvard Internet law professor Jonathan Zittrain, who describes an e-mail tax as "bad in theory and truly unworkable in practice." Taxing e-mail to save a post office makes about as much sense as taxing coffee drinkers for the same purpose, he said.

Fox suggests Wozniak's idea "is not as new, or perhaps as far-fetched, as it sounds." After all, the Internet Tax Freedom Act is set to expire this year, and "government could one day turn to the Internet for a new-age funding stream." But the piece acknowledges the likelihood of an e-mail tax being taken seriously is "slim."

The idea of an Internet or e-mail tax has been floated around practically since the beginning of the Internet. Urban-legend site Snopes has records of "e-mail tax" scams going back to at least 1999.