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.
I would wager that if people were used to using free SMS that they would not
move to a charge per message model.
Every trend is towards flat rate service. The only reason I am considering
getting GPRS is that Tmobile will provide it flat rate.
Being 'free' is part of the email business model, you cannot change that
without changing the character of email.
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.
As is repeated every time this one is brought up, the billing infrastructure
that supports the telcos represents tens of billions of dollars worth of
sunk capital investment and costs several billion dollars a year to
maintain.
Schemes that rely on the magical appearance of a billing infrastructure that
costs almost nothing to use might as well depend on the invention of a
perpetual motion machine. There is no such infrastructure and several
companies have gone bankrupt trying to build one.
The idea of making it uneconomic for spammers to spam is a good one. It is
not necessary to make legit users pay in order to charge the spammers
however. Bonded sender proves that. Transfer of economic value is much more
expensive than if the parties prove that they have destroyed the equivalent
amount of goods if the amounts are less than a cent.
The reason this keeps returning is ideological not technical. Some folk
think that the answer to every complex problem is to recite Chairman Mao,
others recite Ayn Rand, some climb trees and blame everything on the
Starbucks corporation and there is no point in bothering to try to
distinguish between them.
Until you have a mechanism that can support the necessary payments
settlements you don't have a scheme.
Phill
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