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Re: [Asrg] Usefulness of wholesale blocking of attachments for SMTP?

2004-04-19 16:26:43

My reactions to e-postage paper:

      http://www.taugh.com

1. Citing the failure in the 1980s of MCIMail et al is a strawman.

That was a very different time and their charges were outrageous and
presumed they had a certain type of monopoly that their customers
would have to pay to use. That is, e-mail was rare at the time outside
of the research/acadmic world, so MCIMail reflected the pricing of a
special purpose business service not a universal model.

This would be like studying car phone services prior to 1980 (I
believe the first car phones were introduced in the 1930's) to draw
conclusions about current-day mobile phone service. It was all just
too exotic and rare at the time to draw any meaningful conclusions vis
a vis the relative ubiquity and technology advancements of today.

2. Hashcash is just psychotic for so many reasons let's drop that one
   right here and never mention it again. We should call it the
   sphinxification of e-mail (but first, answer me a riddle...) Better
   left in ancient mythologies than built into modern e-mail systems.

3. The whole micropayments issue is a straw man.

Other systems can be described which don't require "micropayments".

The problem is you're way too hung up on spam from the point of view
the end-users, which, as dramatic and annoying as it is, is of course
the least economically portentous way to look at all this just due to
the sheer numbers and nano-value of individual transactions, hence the
straw man

The solution to a problem where some sort of micropayment system seems
inappropriate is to aggregate the problem, not declare it intractable!

You settle at the ISP level who in turn can do whatever they want with
that cost factor: Pass it on to customers directly by adding $.27 for
203 msgs this month (whatever) to their bill, not a big deal really,
or add $1 to the base cost and consider it a cost of doing business
(perhaps up to some limit if they're wise.)

Why don't we just argue, e.g., about whether the IETF should bless
unlimited versus pay per minute versus some service included then pay
for overage internet dial-up services?

Howsabout the whole damned phone system? Isn't that essentially a
"micropayments" system in many aspects?

Don't people feel a little silly arguing that the entire phone system
as currently constituted among several billion people world-wide
represents a charging/payment model which is easily (in a few pages of
this paper, apparently) ``proven'' to be completely untenable because
someone, somewhere might defraud it etc?

Now perhaps you're going to drop back to things you dislike about,
e.g., long-distance phone charges or how there have been trends
towards flat-rate systems etc.

SPARE US!

The claim was that charging per phone call, metaphorically, or per
e-mail, literally, was on the surface impossible and unworkable
etc. yet for the past, I dunno, 75 years, such a system has been in
place and in use by the majority of the world's population and remains
one of the most viable industries on the planet.

But this paper seeks to disprove that the bumblebee cannot possibly
fly!?

How much more arrogant can one get? To completely ignore the entire
world-wide phone system because it's inconvenient to the point being
professed?

This is intellectual slovenliness akin to the Augean Stables!

HOWEVER, this group shouldn't care about any such exact details or
whether they reflect on some sort of universally accepted indisputable
moral goodness right down to possible paper cuts end-users might get
paying their bills and subsequent deaths from gangrene.

Only that a "game", in the game-theoretic sense, is created which can
play itself out and seems inherently tractable and likely to gain some
acceptance (no one loves paying for anything but that can hardly be
offered as a proof positive that toll booths, taxes, phone systems,
etc cannot possibly be made to work!)

4. Counterfeiting et al wouldn't be such a problem if there were some
sort of economic value involved. It'd be a simple theft of service or
similar.

The problem right now is that e-mail has been created as a system with
basically zero claim of transaction value and in fact it has about
zero value right now.

So, under the current system, who exactly is supposed to get excited
and spend millions or billions of dollars to defend this non-value?

No one.

THERE'S NO MONEY IN IT, directly. And, frankly, little money in it
marginally.

So of course there's little interest or expense invested in things
like counterfeiting.

5. Therefore, the true costs are unknown.

Sure, and the true costs of spam are unknown, etc.

I don't think that's a good disproof, it would apply equally to just
about any proposal, it's nearly content-free.

6. Anyhow, since I consider micropayments a straw man there's no need
to deal with the idea that users hate micropayments except to point
out that the average person hates a lot of things like long-distance
charges or bridge tolls or parking meters but that hardly argues that
these are therefore impossible or even undesirable!

In fact I think that's the entire lesson to be learned from the
current spam situation. Devise a system that is utopian for everyman
and look what happens!

As I've said elsewhere, in years past I often wondered why the Boston
(and other but I live in Boston) transit systems aren't just free. How
much trouble must it be to collect the $1 etc, what good would come
out of free transit, people would leave the their cars home or at the
periphery of the city, etc., etc., etc.

Well, after dealing with spam THE SCALES HAVE FALLEN FROM MINE EYES!

That said, I will also add that regardless of whether there is some
sort of e-postage I'd strongly recommend to ISPs, as an ISP myself,
that they NOT manage that charging in a way that causes their
customers to hate them.

That would not be good for business.

Sheesh!

Seriously, it's been ten years, a lot of really smart people have come
up with absolutely nothing, technically, that even works a tiny little
bit.

It's time to go for an e-postage system that simply reflects the
resources being used.

And don't ask me what about "white hat" bulk e-mailers, I DON'T CARE,
the post office won't deliver their stuff for free, there's a reason
for that, why would this new regime be able to do any different?

-- 
        -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
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