-----Original Message-----
From: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 5:56 PM
To: Hannigan, Martin; ASRG
Subject: RE: [Asrg] The pay-per message myth again
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.
I agree. I'm just tossing some thoughts out. As I research this
more, I don't see why a limit on the flat rate wouldn't be helpful,
or doable.
[ snip ]
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.
Why wouldn't existing telco interconnect settlement peering
cover this? One thought is that they don't break out by protocol
in the settlements, they break it out by bits and routes.
-M<
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