ietf-asrg
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [Asrg] The pay-per message myth again

2004-12-26 17:52:57
Ten years ago there were lots of e-mail services that charged by the
message.  Now they're all dead.  This is a big hint.

Of course, nothing has changed in the last 10 years. Nothing ever does,
right? And besides, there have been a lot of businesses that did the other
thing, and have gone also. I just love these "common-sense" arguments.

I'm sorry, but other than that you're trying to be snide, I don't
understand what point you're trying to make.

Of course things have changed in 10 years.  In 1994 there was no giant
unmetered e-mail infrastructure, and there were people willing to pay
per message for e-mail.  Today SMTP exists everywhere, and as I noted
the pay per message services are gone.

It's blindingly obvious that a system that really did charge all
senders even a little bit per message wouldn't have a spam problem, so
why don't we have pay per message email?

The only ppm service of which I'm aware these days is SMS, the text
message add-on to cell service.  PPM charges mirrors cell service
charges.  In North America, where mobile users pay for both incoming
and outgoing calls, PPM is charged per message in both directions.
Carriers all offer message bundles similar to minute bundles that are
a lot cheaper than individual messages.  Elsewhere in the world where
mobile service is all caller-pays, sending SMS costs money, receiving
SMS is free.  Is SMS the wave of the future?  I doubt it.

For one thing, the assumption that you can get people to pay for all
of the messages is wildly optimistic.  I was talking to a security
manager at Vodaphone earlier this year, and he told me that they have
a moderate number of gateways through which messages SMS can be sent
into their SMS system, and they have constatnt problems with spam
gushing in through them due to some combination of configuration
errors and hacks.  Maybe they can fix it, but as I've noted before if
email costs real money, there will be constant attacks to either avoid
paying or (the zombie problem) to charge the messages to someone else.

Also, people who do serious messaging on their cell phones don't pay
per message now.  If you use something like a Blackberry, you don't
pay per message, you use GPRS and pay for bandwidth, or more typically
a (rather high) flat rate, just like everyone else who uses e-mail.

So what am I missing?  Unless you believe that spam will get so awful
that people will turn off SMTP mail, it's hard to see how you're going
to get an interesting number of users to move to something that costs
more and can only exchange messages with other people on the same
system.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet 
for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.


-- 
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 330 5711
johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Mayor, http://johnlevine.com, 
Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg