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Re: [Asrg] Thoughts so far

2003-03-18 16:42:59
Damien Morton wrote:

Well, a recipient that values their time greatly could sign up with a
mail system that charges higher handling rates. Per-recipient rates
might be desireable, but for stopping the mass proliferation of spam,
its not a necessary feature.

All this talk about 'handling rates' and charges and stamps and such... how will we make sure that this does not become just another profit center? I get visions of an email-system that more and more starts to resemble the old telephone system, with artificially inflated rates. Of pay-per-mail email boxes for customer service. 'unfortunately we had to raise the price for mailing our service department to cover costs'... just like the service departments of many companies in Europe, which charge by the minute (and make you wait in a queue for many of those paid minutes, but that's not relevant in this context).

Email as we have it now is, apart from the problems caused by pollution, a valuable and 'free' resource. Not literally free of course, as the upkeep of mail servers and mail service does cost quite a lot of money, but free as in 'unmetered' and 'unlimited'. This has been tremendously important for email to take the role it currently has as a low-barrier communications medium. It is because you don't have to think about things like 'postage' that email has taken off the way it has.

I think we need to be very careful not to destroy these characteristics of email by artificially inflating the price of participation. Careful, also, to keep any monetary barriers from turning into profit centers like eg. happened with x509 certificates.

Just my $.02 (not to be taken literally, yet...)

Frank in SF



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