On Sat 22 May 2004 14:07, John L Fjellstad wrote: > David P James <dpjames@rogers.com> writes: > > 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. > > Not everybody has the same buying power. A few pennies might not be > much for someone living in the Western World, but it might mean a > meal for someone from Somalia or Vietnam. Should email be limited to > those who can afford it? If someone is living such a hand-to-mouth existence it's highly unlikely they'll even have access to the internet. For those who are somewhat better off, there are a number of things to consider. Those with whom that person is likely to be communicating via email will be under similar circumstances, so they'll set their fees accordingly (and of course most people would exempt those with whom they communicate regularly anyway). Second, it is probably better to think of this system as one of including a deposit which in all likelihood will be returned (if only because the recipient might have to pay access your inbox to reply). Third, even if you don't get your payment back, email will still be cheaper and more reliable than most of the other options available to you, such as mail and telephone. No system is ever going to be completely accessible to the destitute, and I doubt that the current system serves them at all anyway (if anything, if they have access at all, they're likely to find themselves on the same ISP as a spammer and consequently blocked by other ISPs and users using RBLs). The current state of email is another example proving the economic concept known as "The Tragedy of the Commons". Any valuable 'free' resource (I say 'free' in the sense of free to the user) will be overused, in some cases to the point of exhaustion or depletion. A number of people have already commented in this thread that if things get much worse they'll give up on email altogether. A communication system based on recipient bears the preponderance of costs will always be open to such a problem (iirc, this problem existed with faxes as well). As an economist, I look at the billions of dollars, resources and manhours wasted on dealing with spam and think of all the investments, jobs and other more useful spending and activities that didn't take place because of it. The same goes with Microsoft's monopoly rent (or tax as some call it) of course, but that's a different problem :) -- 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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