Barry Shein <bzs(_at_)world(_dot_)std(_dot_)com> writes:
On April 28, 2004 at 14:07 asrg(_at_)rebel(_dot_)com(_dot_)au (Chris) wrote:
> So if we take that into consideration what is the limit on the number of
> emails for free or charged 10,20 per day ?
One would imagine it'd become a marketing issue, just like the monthly
price of a connection and how fast that is, etc.
I don't think that this argument works.
We've got an activity (e-mail marketing) which is profitable
for individuals to engage in but produces a large negative
externality (principally the load on people's mailboxes and
the costs they bear to filter out the spam). The e-postage
solution is basically a Pigouvian tax on spamming, forcing
forcing the spammers to bear the cost externality rather than
letting them impose it on the rest of us.
Purely for the purpose of illustration, imagine we imposed
an actual tax on every e-mail sent. In order to discourage
spamming [0], each e-mail sender has to actually pay for
each message. Obviously, your ISP can pre-pay the tax
and then bundle it as part of your service, but someone
has to pay the tax. If not, it doesn't properly discourage
the activity.
In that respect, I don't think that e-postage is any different.
-Ekr
[0] Technically speaking, to have an efficiently level of spamming,
but I think most people expect that would be close to zero.
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