Technology bloggers have written some pretty dumb things about how the major record labels have no right to exist. But delivering something completely stupid apparently requires an intellectual.

A recent story in Slate compares a fledgling major label effort, which will add a fee to ISP charges to cover unlimited access to music, to a "protection racket." Under this idea, Internet access providers would charge users an additional $5 or $10 a month to cover all the music they download, legally or not, then somehow distribute that money to labels, songwriters, and performers. Paying the fee would presumably mean that users could not be sued by one of the labels for copyright violation.

It's a sensible plan, although no one has heard enough details to determine whether it would work. But some tech bloggers are screaming "extortion," and the Slate article compares it to a situation in which "Joey Giggles," a hypothetical ice cream thief, demands five dollars a month to change his ways. This is a great anecdotal lead – that happens to make no sense whatsoever. Not because the major labels haven't engaged in some bullying behavior – they have – but because the ice cream belongs to them to begin with! What if a punk kid – let's give him the name of Reihan Salam, who wrote the Slate story – kept stealing Joey Giggles's ice cream. After years of frustration, Giggles gave up trying to sell his ice cream by the cone and told Salam he'd simply charge him $5 a month for all he could eat. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Salam then goes on to point out all the potential flaws with the idea of what he calls a "music tax." Some of them are valid, such as the idea that the four major labels could use this plan to raise their market share at the expense of indies. But it would be hard to imagine that any label could get a deal like this through without getting an independent company to monitor file-trading and then distributing the money that comes in from ISPs according to which songs get played. Such a company already exists: BigChampagne. And there's a precedent for this kind of arrangement. ASCAP and BMI collect and distribute money on behalf of songwriters according to a formula that determines how often their compositions are played on the radio, and in restaurants and bars. No one has suggested that any kind of data measurement system is perfect, but it wouldn't be that hard to make it reasonably accurate.

Salam's point seems to be that major labels could use a music tax to cut out the indies. But indie-label music has become so popular that it's hard to imagine any serious music fan wanting to buy a subscription that didn't include it. And indie labels have improved their negotiating power by signing deals with digital distributors like the Orchard and organizing a new trade organization called Merlin.

Salam then goes on to suggest that the government get involved, by imposing a "small tax on all broadband subscribers." Performers and songwriters could register their songs with the Copyright Office, which could set up a system for distributing the tax revenue. It's a fine idea – and almost certainly not so different from what the majors actually have in mind.

In Salam's mind, this would cut out "middlemen like Steve Jobs and the fat-cat record execs." But Jobs doesn't make much money on iTunes anyway – Apple's profits come from its iPod devices, which are some of the highest-margin electronics items available. And the record execs would keep their same role: discovering and marketing music. Salam ends his essay by joking that "My a cappella version of 'Chocolate Rain' would have as much chance of making it as 'Purple Rain,' at least in theory." Maybe so. In practice, though, I'm betting on Prince.