This FTC business is an excellent case study of why sender-pays
makes sense only in the restricted sense of Hotmail's model (if there).
Imagine that there were a bulk-sender-pays system in place. Assume
that all of what I claim are insurmountable problems are somehow
resolved.
Now comes the FTC commission with an anticipated mailing of
250,000,000 mesages.
Barry says "None of my users will receive those confirmation
messages unless you pay me to deliver them."
The FTC says, "Ok, none of your users will receive their confirmation
messages. You might want to let them know that as a consequence
their world.std.com addresses will not be entered on the FTC's do
not spam list, but if not, that's ok too."
I don't know how Barry might respond, but I suspect that many of
his customers would not be pleased and will switch to an ISP that
does not participate in the bulk-mail-sender-settlements system.
Variations of that story fit every other case where the bulk mail is
wanted, whether FTC DNS confirmations, CNN "news alerts," or dirty
pictures. The only cases where Barry can get his own customers to go
along with a bland refusal of bulk senders to pay is when the mail is
unwanted by his customers. Thus, all providers of solicited or non-spam
bulk mail will blandly refuse to join the sender-pays party. Sender-pays
devolves into senders paying to have unwanted mail delivered. On the
plausible side of the spectrum, we have advertising pushed on AOL and
Hotmail users. At the other end, we have the silly notion of spammers
being voluntarily paying.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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