-----Original Message-----
From: asrg-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
[mailto:asrg-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org]On Behalf Of
Jon Kyme
Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 12:17 PM
To: ASRG
Cc: John Levine
Subject: Re: [Asrg] The pay-per message myth again
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.
No, I'm pointing out a clearly fallacious argument. This is
not to say that
your conclusions are wrong of course, but to say that
pay-to-send can't
work in the future because it didn't work in the past is to
say nothing
useful.
Pay to send clearly does work in other models today. SMS, as mentioned
below is one.
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.
It's interesting that you mention SMS, in the European
market, 160 billion
messages are exchanged per month
[ http://www.gsmworld.com/documents/netsize_guide2004_mda.pdf
](I haven't
got a good figure for email to hand - probably rather more,
but how many
are spam :-) ). So it seems foolish to speculate about SMS
*in the future*
- while the US 'cellphone' biz is weak by comparison, in most of the
'developed' world SMS *is* the asynchronous messaging channel
of choice for
for some big (and important) user-groups.
I'll have to differ on the opine and insinuation regarding SMS not
being the wave of the future. It's already here and it's the absolute
rage in Europe and Asia.
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.
I've seen a lot of *very* poorly secured web/SMS gateways and
I'm sure that
there exist all sorts of other ways that spam gets into the
system that
could (and should) be closed.
And Vodafone is a telco. Their experience billing voice minutes,
and their reliance on the revenue as a public company, will help
them resolve that issue, but it will *never* be gone. Fraud will
account for 3 to 8% of all their revenue across all product lines,
including SMS. But this is good. Telco's prosecute fraud under
theft statutes which are more cut and dry than any electronic spam
statute I've seen is.
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.
That is slightly inaccurate. I have a blackberry and I do have a message
cap before I must start paying.
I think you'll find that a lot of email is sent using somebody else's
bandwidth. Apart from that, I'm not sure what "serious messaging" is:
is 100 users each sending 1MB messages more 'serious' than 100K users
sending 10 of 100 character messages per day?
Serious messaging would be "us". But I will keep emphasizing that
"we" are not the target market anymore, we're simply the milk men.
In 1995? Yes. "Us". Today? "them".
Think "Milk and Cereal".
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.
No, rather, spam gets so bad that people are prepared to incur costs
reducing the pain. I don't know (any more than you, perhaps) what that
means. Do they move to other channels? Closed systems? Spend
on hardware
and bandwith so that their PCs can cope?
Under the billing model, SPAM is eliminated. It becomes fraud.
Presumably the market will respond to the problem in a way
that tends to
maximise the utility of the system for the largest number of
participants?
Oh no, wait, I meant to say: "maximise profits for those with the most
control over the current system".
The market won't respond until it's lost revenue. We keep spawning
these technology areas that are fairly useless and of limited lifespan
i.e. IPS, IDS, etc. It's all fraud when it's revenue based.
If I were a fraud software developer I'd be buying some of these
companies that have been created related to this failure to address
these problems at the revenue and executive levels.
In fact, IMHO, we are partly to blame. We've consistently gone to our
management and said "we can do this" and "we can do that". It's time
to say "we can't do anything -- help us".
-M<
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