No, we give them a free ride because the incremental cost of each
message we receive is so close to zero as to be effectively zero.
Who's this "we"? The cost of a received email to me is substantially
greater than zero. Even the ones that are delete-on-sight cost me at
least a few seconds of my time.
However, SMS messages cost me actual money to receive, so in spite of
all the useful services available via SMS, there are exactly zero
companies I have authorized to send me messages via that mechanism.
That's an interesting analogy. SMSes cost me no money at all to
receive, but I go to moderately extreme lengths to avoid stray SMSes
because the human-layer costs involved are much higher. (Typically,
they wake me up.)
[...] that would still kill vast amounts of mail that people want,
such as this very mailing list.
Only if you assume a system where everybody is required to pay all
the time, which is a ridiculous strawman. There's no technical reason
why I should not be able to simply whitelist traffic from this list
to be delivered for free.
Except that that leaves you wide open to spam forged to appear to be
from the list - or even sent through the list.
Even if the hypothetical system was so dumb that it required everyone
to pay to send e-mail all the time, a lot of things that used to be
handled as e-mail are handled as web feeds now, and this list could
easily be one of them.
This sounds like "what's more, it doesn't matter if it _does_ kill off
email, because there are other things taking over from email anyway".
I disgaree. You can go use your web feeds if you like. I'll stick
with email, thankyouverymuch. I actually hope "most people" join you
in jumping to the web; if the population of email users drops back to
pre-September-that-never-ended levels, spam might move off email.
And of course, a lot of the commercial traffic is moving towards the
social networking sites too. Where, strangely enough, it seems not to
be impossible to charge commercial senders small fees per message.
Well, sure. They have a "post office", in that all communication goes
through a central clearinghouse organization. It works fine, at small
scales and with many such clearinghouses.
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