At 05:04 PM 3/18/2003 -0500, Damien Morton wrote:
> From: Steve Schear [mailto:schear(_at_)attbi(_dot_)com]
<snip>
> > > How does this work when clients use an open access Wi-Fi link or
> > > other situations where free and anonymous access is being granted?
> >
> >Obviously open servers become a financial liability to the people
> >running them, but then, that's part of the goal.
>
> No, I don't think it is. The goal of sender-pays is to
> reduce spam by
> shifting the burden onto the sender and not the
> intermediaries, whom ever
> they may be. Your alternative might more accurately be called
> intermediary-pays.
Well intermediary-pays allows the intermediary to set the charging
policy. They can implement a sender-pays arrangement, they can offer
sending credits to authenticated members, they can work within a trusted
group of servers that don't charge each other. It's a very flexible
system, on top of which sender-pays can be constructed. The point is -
it turns anybody operating a mailserver into a financially accountable
entity. It also means that only the relationship between the immediate
sender and reciever need be considered at the point of sending (even if
one or both are acting as intermediaries).
It would also probably end anonymous remailers and similar services for
societal good.
I like to think of the system as modeled on the relationships between
national postal services, where each mail server is equivalent to the
national postal service of a single nation. Every nation (server) has
its own handling charges, and every nation has its own international
postage pricing based on their own handling charges and those of the
destination. Two nations (servers) with identical handling fees sending
each other the same volume of mail would, at the end of the day, have no
currency changing hands. In this way cooperating peers would have little
financial exposure.
I like to think of the Internet as an undifferentiated transport method
with little intelligence, high performance, agnostic in relationship and
low cost. The more value add services that are required at the gateway,
the greater the costs and the lower the communication freedom.
> >Nothing stops them from
> >running free and open servers, but any mail they handle and
> send on to
> >other servers will be charged for by the receiving servers, or is
> >simply not accepted.
>
Users wanting unimpeded anonymous communications to reach them would
tend to migrate to servers with no handling charges.
How many such services do you expect to exist if the servers have to pay
for email they provide for free. Few if any. That's why I don't want such
a system unless and until assured anonymous digital cash systems are in
place so such servers can charge clients w/o knowing their identity. As it
is today no such infrastructure exists. That's one of the side benefits to
using bearer postage: it de facto launches such a service and creates the
infrastructure.
"War is just a racket ... something that is not what it seems to the
majority of people. Only a small group knows what its about. It is
conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the
masses." --- Major General Smedley Butler, 1933
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