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February 19, 2006
What's wrong with charging for email?
The enormous uproar over Yahoo and AOL's plan to charge businesses for sending commercial email to their subscribers made me start thinking about the problem of spam, which Bill Gates, a couple years ago, promised would be solved by now.
And he might well be right – in the Bizarro World.
Anyway, if all of a sudden it was decreed that it would cost, say, one–tenth of a cent to send an email — to anyone — and that this would be true for everyone everywhere in the U.S., I'd sign up in a heartbeat.
I send maybe 30 emails a day, times 30 days/month = 900 emails a month = 90 cents month.
Big deal.
But the small charge would eliminate spam.
Instantly.
So what's wrong with charging for email?
It can't happen soon enough.
February 19, 2006 at 02:01 PM | Permalink
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Comments
The way I heard this plan explained on NPR is that while AOL touts their spam blocking to regular customers, they would sell advertisers a way around those blockers. Customers are supposed to feel all warm and fuzzy because the officially sanctioned spamvertising will come with a seal of approval, so you know you're not getting second-rate spam.
It's sort of like the way phone companies charge you for caller ID and call blocking and then sell telemarketers ways around them.
Posted by: Al Christensen | Feb 20, 2006 7:47:16 AM
Many of the same things are wrong with charging for e-mail as are wrong with charging for Web page views (which is one of the unicorns-and-eskimoes plans to make Web sites pay without ads - see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23754&cid=2563837 :-).
Sure, an ISP that started charging a cent per message, or whatever, would turn spam from their servers into more of a conventional junk mail proposition. Serious spammers don't use servers in the Western world, though; the _spammers_ may be American, but they're sending from servers in China or Korea or whereever. In those countries, many ISPs are still perfectly happy to host spammers, and so have no reason to implement pay-per-message policies that'd drive their lucrative spam clients away to whatever ISPs _didn't_ charge per message.
Income disparities also come into play. An ISP in China that implements a one US cent per message policy will lose honest _Chinese_ customers, seeing as their average wage is a few per cent of the average wage in the States.
It would also make mailing lists uneconomical to manage, have the potential to destroy the lives of grandmas who find their computer has been a spam zombie for a week and has cost them $15,000, create insoluble problems for anonymous remailers and cool things like the Internet Oracle, and I'll leave you to tick the rest of the boxes yourself:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98024&cid=8373855
:-)
Posted by: Daniel Rutter | Feb 19, 2006 9:01:50 PM
Well,
posting on bookofjoe is a spam-trap.
Since I started posting here using one particular email address (the one above), I've been getting spam to that account and I am seriously considering de-activating it.
So, I guess, charge for emails...then people will think before they send them...and they'll start posting more on blogs instead of writing these types of messages straight to the Blog Owner, like I would normally do!!!!!
3LC
Posted by: Three Layer Cake | Feb 19, 2006 3:12:52 PM
