On May 1, 2003 at 15:38 vjs(_at_)calcite(_dot_)rhyolite(_dot_)com (Vernon
Schryver) wrote:
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.
It's a colloqualism? It's a reflexive response to "why?"
At any rate, the point is that mail will be paid for. If we simplify
that to either the Sender pays or the Recipient pays then arguing that
it's not right (fair?) to make the sender pays leaves us with the
recpient paying.
Now we can discuss which of those two is the right thing.
What I said earlier was the market would set the specific price of any
new regimen, in answer to someone asking me what the pricing would be
(for sender-pays mail.)
To some extent a new pricing discipline does have to show some
superficial amount of "fairness" if one expects the legal system to
enforce contracts. For starters it has to be agreed that it's legal,
but there's more involved (e.g. anti-trust considerations.)
But that begs the question, somewhat.
However, what a new pricing discipline does not necessarily have to do
is withstand nit-picking scrutiny from people who were previously
getting the same service for (more or less) free.
I wouldn't ask a spammer, e.g., whether it seemed reasonable to charge
for sending spam. etc.
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.
You use a lot of loaded terms here, specifically to portray these
ideas as inherently retrograde.
I don't think that imposing a pricing model on bulk e-mailers is
tautological with morphing into 1980's style BBS's.
I do think that in the email world "point to point" is dying a rapid
and painful death. For example, consider large ISPs who now block port
25 entirely.
Ah well, it was a nice idea. Being able to create an account from the
login prompt on ITS at MIT was a nice idea, but...hmm, actually you
can create an acct from our login prompt...
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.
I think it's going to be difficult to tax something which isn't priced
though I'd agree that if the ISPs began charging for bulk email (e.g.)
the govt would probably soon tax it, they can't resist a clanging cash
register, or conversely if the govt ever required the ISPs to account
for bulk email (to assess taxation) the ISPs would quickly come up
with the idea of adding their own charge to that same data.
But it's not the worst fate if it brings sanity to this mess.
I'll make my own prediction:
If something doesn't happen to reflect mail volume back into the
income for ISPs email will in a few years be owned by the RBOCs as
everyone else exits or bankrupts out of the business, and the RBOCs
will just merge it into SMS and charge you 15 cents per message for
every single msg.
Choose your nightmare.
--
-Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs(_at_)TheWorld(_dot_)com |
http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD
The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
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