On Fri 21 May 2004 08:36, Tom Allison wrote:
> Tim Connors wrote:
...
> >
> > The only solution is education, but unforuntalely, 50% of the
> > population are just too god damn fucking stupid to get it - witness
> > the spam for some kind of drug with plenty of spelling errors, that
> > advertises that the business is being shut down by the drugs
> > administration, so get in quick. Who could possibly be so fucking
> > stupid to respond to an ad like that? Unfortunately, enough people
> > to make the whole business profitable.
>
> Spam is a BILLION dollar industry.
> Get that into your head and then you'll realize that Spam will NEVER
> go away. Too many people buy it, too many companies profit from it.
Well you're on the right track -the problem is an economic one. Inboxes
aren't owned in any tangible sense - you can't charge anyone for the
privilege of filling your inbox. Nor is there a delivery charge of any
kind. Because of this, spammers face virtually no costs to send
millions of emails and even if only a tiny fraction respond, they can
still make money. The fact that they impose enormous costs
("externalities") on millions of users, businesses and governments is
of no consequence to them.
Now suppose you could demand a payment whenever someone sent you an
email. It would only need to be a few pennies in all probability.
Spammers simply couldn't afford to pay all those inbox fees. The
individual user would be able to set the fee and exempt those whom they
wished to allow access.
This idea has some technical issues, and would require a system of
payment clearing more sophisticated than anything like PayPal. It would
probably require that banks get involved as well as a system of
including a payment with a message (a neat side effect would be that
digital signing would simply have to become more common). But once
spammers had to pay to access every inbox on the planet the problem
would essentially disappear.
--
David P James
Ottawa, Ontario
http://david.jamesnet.ca
ICQ: #42891899, Jabber: davidpjames@jabber.org
If you've lost something, you had to lose it, not loose it.
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