An implicit assumption in this discussion is that in the ePostage model
money must flow from sender to receiver.
That could alleviate the settlement issues, but the transaction cost and
identity issues aren't affected.
Indeed, if you think about it, this is more directly analogous to the
gummed-paper physical postage stamps we all know and love.
I've never heard much support for a model where we all have to buy stamps
from one central post office or a small number of post offices. In the
paper stamp model, the price of the stamps actually pays for delivering
the mail. In the e-postage model, I've never understood what the stamps
are supposed to pay for beyond acting to deter senders, particularly if
they don't go to the recipient to defray the cost of handling incoming
mail.
In the phone system, which Barry cited as a model, there is a complex and
often contentious system of settlements and compensation to calculate how
much the recipient network gets paid to handle incoming calls. I think it
supports the point in my paper that any system with real money is going to
have its own mountain of rules, fraud, lawsuits, and so forth that is
likely to be much worse to deal with than whatever it was supposed to solve.
If it sounds like I'm saying we should throw up our hands and give up, I'm
not, but there's an old saw that for any complex problem there's a
solution that's simple, elegant and wrong, and if the problem is spam,
e-postage is that solution.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com
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