From: Barry Shein <bzs(_at_)world(_dot_)std(_dot_)com>
> I don't see why we, as an ISP, or our customer should pay for the emails
> to be delivered to other ISPs, ASPs, ...
Because that's a generally acceptable way to deal with scaling issues
such as sending out millions of newsletters. The other choice is that
the recipient is paying, why is that more fair (particularly in the
case of bulk commercial email)?
What's "fair" got to do with it? You said repeatedly earlier that
all that matters is what market wants and is willing to pay for.
As I understand it, your reasoning implies that AOL would never have
joined the Internet years ago but would have stayed separate. After
all, AOL had all of those users that everyone on the Internet would
be eager to pay to reach. I've the impression that for years AOL
thought that was valid reasoning. Are you saying that spam is such
a serious problem that major ISPs will be able to stuff the Internet
back into the big-BBS model? If so, I disagree. I think that the
idea of point-to-point applications including for email has irrevocably
replaced the world that gave us European style PTTs, U.S. style Ma
Bell, and the big BBSs of AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy.
I do agree that money will eventually be invoked to control (but not
fix) the spam problem. My long standing prediction is that eventually
governments will tax commercial bulk email, but not political or
"non-profit" bulk mail (whether spam or not). The tax will be sold
to consumers as "providing universal service," "closing the digital
divide," "protecting our children from porn spam," and "infrastructure
upgrades to fight terrorism" (i.e. pay for the FBI's wet dreams of
point-and-click remote wire taps). Failure to pay the $0.01 to
$0.05/addressee tax will be a felony. Half of the money will go to
the bureacracy that counts the money and chases tax evaders. The
other half will be given to ISPs that agree to play the game.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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