john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com (John C Klensin) writes:
..., as soon as one institutes either charging schemes or collections of
bilateral agreements, there are huge incentives to created "hub systems"
or "carriers" -- entities whose business it is to make agreements with
lots of local providers/servers (whom they will come to call "customers")
and bilateral agreements with each other. Without that, everyone who
wants to run a mail server has to either establish bilateral agreements
with everyone else, or a regulatory regime becomes necessary to make the
sequential settlement arrangements work. Economies of scale, if only in
agreement-making, imply few enough, and large enough, carriers for
governments to start taking interest on a "competition" or "anti-trust"
or "consumer protection" basis. Sorry to be pessimistic about this, but
I think it quickly takes us where we don't want to go.
Quoting Stef, "be careful what you wish for..."
i'm not worried about this. in fact, i'm *counting* on the existence of a
new class of businesses which i call "trust providers" or "trust brokers"
whose only claim to revenue is when they act as a trusted trust aggregator
so that i don't have to attend key signing parties in order to be able to
confidently accept mail based on reasonable certainty of the relay's intent,
the identity of the sender, and the value (to the sender) of the receipt.
will it be abused? you betcha. two ways off the top of my head. first,
as jck says above, there's a lot of antitrust concern if for example verisign
decided to "trust-peer" with yahoo and noone else, and yahoo did likewise,
in hopes that the two of them could "pull a uunet" in terms of making everyone
else in the world their customer before a more diverse market can become
established. fortunately we have the sherman act in the usa and similar
things elsewhere, so, unless microsoft itself decided to play, we're safe.
second, will be a class of trustbrokers who will try very hard to blur the
distinctions as to exactly what they are "promising about", so as to feed
you "gray spam" and reap both the transactional rewards associated with the
work AND kickbacks and bribes from the senders of the gray spam. these folks
will have to be put out of business the old fashioned way, by poison reverse.
that is, a large number of consumers and other trustbrokers will have to
declare "gray promises" to have negative value, thus rendering them worthless.
all this goes to show is that there is no silver bullet, no one size fits all,
no magic pill or potion. as long as we fit breitbart's "can be reached by
an ip packet from" notation, then we'll have the lower end of the humanity
scale nibbling at our resources, trying to take something and give nothing,
and so on. however, even though unsolicited fax is dead, consider the
telemarketing field. when my phone rings, there's a better than even chance
that it isn't a telemarketer. it's not 100% but it's better than even. if
we could get that for an ibcs that replaced smtp, i'd be singing in the aisles.
by the way mr. deutsch, there is no reference work available. i've waved my
arms about this stuff and described it to no less than 1.5 dozen people in
the last six years, at varying levels of bakedness, but i don't want to have
to do the work myself and i met have no success in getting anybody else to
take it on. therefore there's no formal design, not even a list of criteria,
and nothing's been wrote up, and there's no wheel for you to duplicate, so you
have a clear field and i encourage you to take advantage of the fact that the
rest of the world thinks this is just crackpot stupidity on the march. please
put me on your friends and family list if you squeeze an IPO out of it, though.
--
Paul Vixie