Re: [Asrg] Thoughts so far

At 12:41 AM 3/19/2003 +0100, Frank de Lange wrote:
> 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...)
One of my friends, who is also a supporter of sender-pays, raised similar 
concerns that ISPs and other intermediaries might move to do just 
that.  That's another reason that the intermediaries should not have any 
hand, unless a user agrees to have their ISP proxy for them, in handling 
the sender-pays settlement process.  The more we ask commercial entities to 
become involved if there is money on the table, the more likely that free 
email of any kind could vanish.
That's why I support initial implementation of sender-pays using 
Proof-of-Work postage.  Since no monetary value is conferred between the 
end-points there is no financial interest to whet the appetite of the 
intermediaries.  Once this infrastructure is in place end-to-end some 
parties can then elect to charge real money to meter their mailbox, but by 
that time the technology will be familiar and mostly invisible to the end-user.
steve

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