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.
I'm not convinced.
We all know that receiving mail is vastly more expensive than sending
it.
Yes...but.
We receivers cheerfully give the legit senders a free ride because we
find their mail worth reading.
Right. So, to what extent does that mean that mean that "pay fairly"
would mean that the senders would have to bear the full cost?
It seems to me that fairer "pay fairly" would have the recipients
assuming those costs to the extent that they value the mail. When I go
visit a friend, I don't ask the friend to pay for half the transport
cost (gas, transit ride, whatever); the visit is valuable enough to me
for me to assume those costs myself. (With some friends, visits go
both ways and mostly balance out; with others, they don't, but, in the
cases where I do the visiting more, the visits are valuable enough for
me to be willing to assume an "unfair" share of the transport cost.)
Same goes with email, only the fundamental costs are _much_ lower, and
are almost entirely human time. (Yes, there are other costs, but they
are _tiny_ compared to the human-time costs.)
That's basically what e-postage is based upon: an attempt to impose
fair payment based on a notion of fairness somewhat like that one.
(Not that this says anything about the myriad of other reasons
e-postage won't work in anything like today's world, such as the
impossibility of a suitable micropayment scheme. Just that I don't
think "fair" is quite as simple here as you make it out to be.)
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.
That too isn't quite as simple as you make it out to be.
First, that assumes that the "skip charging" decision is based solely
on the sender's identity. This is a reasonable first approximation,
but not more than that; it's totally plausible to me that I might want
some mail from a sender but not other - as with a company who sends me
both stuff I want (order confirmations, say) and stuff I don't (ads).
Today, we object to such things being mixed in the same email stream,
but that's because we need (FSVO "need") to make mechanized filtering
decisions based on simple prima-facie properties of the email.)
Second, that assumes that the decision to charge or not is based on
properties simple enough to be tested mechanically. If we had this
mythical payment scheme, I know of some people I would wave off the
charges for most mail from, but would definitely charge for things like
chain email or yet another copy of the latest bigoted "joke" meme.
Third, it assumes that we have sender identities reliable enough that
we can mechanically detect whether the mail is from someone you don't
want to charge (or filter). (I suppose this can be handwaved under "if
you're discussing a mythical system, it can have as many counterfactual
properties as you want".)
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.
Speak for yourself - I live downtown in a big city and have nowhere at
all to keep a pony. I'd much rather have about another thousand square
feet of machine-room space. :-)
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