Paid email is unlikely to come about because of a joint agreement among
ISPs or lawmakers. But it might easily come about (without settlements) in
the following way.
Somewhere some ISP will decide to allocate abuse desk costs among the
divisions. The dial-up manager will then change his policy from unlimited
free email for each account, to perhaps "1,000 free messages per month".
His marketing person will advise him that to the average dolt, "1,000"
seems like MORE than "unlimited", since the average person is not too good
with numbers. Once this limitation is imposed, his share of the abuse desk
will drop to near zero, and he may even collect a few bucks for additional
message (perhaps at $1/1000).
Then the T1 division, seeing this, will decide that for new accounts only
100,000 messages on port 25 go with each T1 each month, and any more need
to be paid for, at perhaps $1/10,000 messages. This is also a success,
and within a year the abuse desk can be reduced to a part timer. Other
ISPs will follow suit, but what about ISPs that don't have an abuse desk
expense? Won't spammers just end up with them? Yes, and they will end up
on blacklists. That is a fine equilibrium.
No settlements, no public spirit, just better accounting. (And an MTA that
can keep some records).
On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Barry Shein wrote:
On April 19, 2004 at 23:24 research(_at_)solidmatrix(_dot_)com (Yakov
Shafranovich) wrote:
> With the current state of affairs I simply do not see how any kind of
> e-postage system would take off at all within a reasonable span of time
> even once all of the technical issues have been addressed. The same goes
Isn't this the canned, applies to anything, response?
It's been nearly ten years and no one has come up with anything,
perhaps it's time to put the "that would take too long to be accepted"
on the back burner and discuss other aspects?
> for any proposal calling for a major infrastructure overhaul - there
> simply isn't enough monetary or non-monetary incentive for network
> operators, software providers and governments to make a major change of
> that scale. It may very well be that the system may collapse due to that
> (which I personally do not think will happen).
It (e-postage) doesn't require much any infrastructure overhaul.
Maybe some ways of imagining it being implemented do, but maybe the
goal should be to say well, if we do it that way it'd require a major
infrastructure haul, can we do it some other way.
In brief how about:
A) Each ISP creates stamps according to some accepted method,
probably some cryptographic approach. Think SSL certificates or
some similar precedent.
B) They attach a stamp to mail according to some policy such
as e-mail originating from their customers.
C) Stamps can be allocated according to any policy they choose, at
least at first. For example, give each customer 1,000 stamps per
month and charge for excess, whatever, that's a marketing decision.
D) However, other ISPs can choose to transit or not email with
particular stamps.
E) Unstamped mail could be accepted for a while and then ISPs can
choose to reject it.
Ok, maybe it needs work. But it's hardly off-the-wall, and it doesn't
require major infrastructure nor would take years and years. If a few
major players said this is the way we're going, here's some software
to do this, and we'd be off and running.
I don't propose that as a worked-out solution, only as an example that
one can approach the problem more positively, and to point out that
ready-made, all-purpose blow-offs like "it would take too long" really
don't improve the quality of discussion, except perhaps when posed as
questions rather than assertions.
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