Barry says:
The simple assertion:
If spammers had to pay fairly for the resources they use then there
would be no spam problem as we know it today.
is prima facie true and obvious, or should be.
Indeed it is true. But this is equally true and obvious:
If senders of e-mail had to pay fairly for the resources they use
then there would be no e-mail as we know it today.
Every sender of mail gets a free ride, both legitimate ones and
spammers. We all know that receiving mail is vastly more expensive
than sending it.
We receivers cheerfully give the legit senders a free ride because we
find their mail worth reading. If we imagined some sort of settlement
system to charge back costs to senders, and even if we imagine,
despite all the experience to the contrary, that the settlement system
itself didn't cost orders of magnitude more than the settlements it's
supposed to handle, that would still kill vast amounts of mail that
people want, such as this very mailing list. Some senders would pay,
but probably not the ones you're most eager to hear from. It'd be the
ones who'd otherwise send you paper mail, e.g., your electric bill,
and banks offering you credit cards.
How would we keep from killing all the mail we want? The only method
anyone has ever proposed is for the recipients to skip charging
settlements to senders they like. But once you know who you wouldn't
charge, you don't need the charges, you just whitelist the ones you
wouldn't have charged and filter the rest. You'd still need some way
to get new senders into your whitelist, but the complete failure of
systems like Vanquish offers no reason to expect that charging is the
way to do it.
R's,
John
PS: If I seem a bit crabby about this, perhaps it is because I have
spent considerable time researching the way that proposed micropayment
systems work, researching the cost models for e-mail, telephone calls,
paper mail, and other messaging systems, and trying to build models
for the way filtering and charging might work and how they might or
might not scale and how they might be subverted by hostile parties.
So when someone shows up who hasn't bothered to do any research of his
own but just starts up with proposals that research would show have
failed in the past or have fundamental scaling or economic problems,
well, I guess I feel like an ISP talking to a kid saying "any idiot
can run an ISP, you just set up a couple of Linux boxes and some
modems and the customers come flowing in."
PPS: To anyone who is about to say "then don't do it that way, do it
some other way", we all want a pony, too.
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