[I added the required POSTAGE key to the subject line]
On November 28, 2008 at 15:39 johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com (John Levine) wrote:
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.
How much do you believe a typical email costs? How many have you sent
this month. Multiply the two numbers together and report back.
Individual spammers send O(billion) per day. Now, take that cost from
the first part and multiply instead by a billion.
Whaddya think?
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.
Well, perhaps therein lies the problem.
We receivers cheerfully give the legit senders a free ride because we
find their mail worth reading.
Well, actually, you assume the cost is borne by others in most cases,
and hope that system remains financially viable.
I don't know what your definition of legit senders is but I'm not so
cheerful about the amount of email I apparently open myself up to when
I buy a little trinket over the internet or similar.
"Cheerful" is certainly a strong overstatement from my point of view.
I must get a few messages per hour from orgs who would argue they have
a "legit" reason to send to me, from online vendors to trade rags, to
folks who buy my name from those trade rags et al and all day pelt me
with "Free Webinar!" and "New White Paper on How To Give Us More of
Your Money!"
And it grows without bounds.
Not to mention, as an ISP, the monotonically increasing number of
these "legit" messages which continue to be sent to accounts closed
years ago.
If the cost to the senders is zero then what's the motivation for them
to ever clean up their lists?
So, I'm not comfortable with your characterization.
I'll only go so far as to say: There exists at last one email I
receive for which I cheerfully give a free ride to the sender, and
probably even N where N>1, but of the M messages I receive daily N<<M
(i.e., N is much smaller than M).
And speaking as an ISP I'd have to say that N<<<M, that is, N is a
tiny percentage of emails received here, since so much of it, maybe
80% or more, is addressed to no recipient here.
I think we can design within the parameters that as currently
conceived very, very little of the email received at most sites is
desired by the recipient. And even less would the recipient care if
the sender got to send it for free, e.g., come-ons from online
vendors, you might even enjoy receiving them, but that doesn't mean
you care if they are free or not so long as you don't have to pay for
them explicitly.
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
What experiences are these?
I know there's a myth that goes around that for example most of the
cost of a telephone call comes from the billing itself but every time
that passes by someone who actually knows something about the topic,
like has worked in telecom cost analysis w/in large telcos, they find
it an amusing idea.
Besides, an economist might well tell you there isn't anything even
inherently wrong with that even if it were true. The cost of something
isn't based on your personal sense of engineering efficiency or
similar, it's based on what people will pay for the good or service.
Billing etc is honest work, it pays employees, it rewards
stockholders, etc.
And if it causes resources to be used responsibly and distributed
fairly so that costs are borne by those who incur those costs then all
the better!
At some point we begin to sound like heavy-handed central planners,
cut lunch breaks in half!, why should consumers pay for these workers'
lunch breaks!
I mean, hey, maybe you're ok with lunch breaks but not billing costs
but that begs the question.
The point is central planning versus (reasonably) open markets.
Now, I'm hardly some sort of free market nut, but I also get
suspicious when someone is trying to dictate pricing models rather
than enabling them.
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
Orders of magnitude! Now, these examples I really want to see!
people want, such as this very mailing list.
Again, you're pre-supposing a particular pricing model and working
backwards from there.
Many, many times in this thread I have addressed this particular
canard yet you will come back every time as if it has never been said.
So, being a patient person, I will try again:
Individual spammers send out about a billion msgs per day.
I doubt this list sends out 10,000 a day but let's use that number,
10^9 vs 10^4, a difference of 10^5.
Now, if this hypothetical system cost the list 1c per day ($36.50/year
other than years divisible by four except if divisible by 400 when
it's $36.60), then at the same rate it would cost that spammer
$1,000/day. I doubt that spammer could pay $1K/day legitimately. Yet
I'd imagine $36.50/year is negligible.
But even that assumes a very simplistic, one rate fits all,
non-progressive scale.
Is there any inherent reason why we would (if we could) adopt a very
simplistic, one rate fits all, non-progressive scale?
I don't think so.
As a not for profit (IETF) you might get certain classes of email for
free or nearly so. Etc.
Once one decides to set pricing then there's a lot of latitude in
designing a pricing model.
But without pricing all you really have is bickering about what is
meant by "unsolicited" or "legit" etc.
...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.
*I* never proposed any such thing.
I think the idea that it'd be up to the recipient to establish the
pricing model is nonsensical, so we agree.
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.
How can you say this when I have typed in a perfectly reasonable model
perhaps a dozen times even just in the past several days?
Either you're not reading any of this thread or you don't understand
it or you're willfully ignoring what's been said.
Nothing I have ever said, nor believe, involves recipients deciding
who to charge or not charge.
That would be as flawed a model as if the postal service let you
decide how much postage each mail item you receive was charged at the
door!
Imagine, the postman stands there and you go thru the mail for you w/
him/her/it and you say to him/her/it): Ok, this one I want, um, 40c,
this one, not sure, how about a dime, no this one not at all, return
it...
But actually you're proposing the opposite, no? This mail I really
want, charge them zero, this one I'm curious about, oh, charge them
40c, this one I don't want at all, just return it.
Oh yeah that'd work...NOT!
...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.
Well, no one (or at least not I!) is proposing any such system.
It's a straw man.
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.
Yet you've completely missed everything said in this thread and just
proceeded to repeatedly present unworkable models and declared them
(and by extrapolation all others) unworkable.
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."
Many have done just that and done pretty well! But let's not quibble,
I get your point.
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.
I don't know what this means. I assume it's meant to forestall any
further discussion by attempting to propose systems which might
actually work or at least are plausibly different from those you
consider implausible?
I suggest you pay closer attention to what is actually being said
rather than dredging up unworkable systems and declaring them
unworkable.
Several people here seem to have picked up on what I have been
actually talking about and seem interested even if just from an
abstract point of view, but some see that it could be practical or at
least is no more impractical than anything else being discussed.
I'll say it again: This is a research group. If every possible detail
has been worked out before the idea is raised then it's hardly
research.
--
-Barry Shein
The World | bzs(_at_)TheWorld(_dot_)com |
http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Login: Nationwide
Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
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