From: Frank de Lange
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).
A very valid concern.
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.
Email certainly wouldn't have take off the way it has if it was charged
for in the same way SMS is.
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
I guess I was picturing a system in which money was used to redress
imbalances between net senders of email and net receivers of email.
That's why I was talking in terms of payment (of some kind) between
servers rather than between end-users. I was imagining a system in which
communicating peers, exchanging equal quantities of mail, would need no
monetary reconciliation. Im assuming that an ISP's or companies' mail
server, barring spam, produces and consumes roughly the same amount of
mail.
Your points are well taken, however.
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