March 05, 2004
Gates: "Buy" stamps to send e-mail
...the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender's good faith.Some proposals even allow recipients to set their own rates. A college student might accept e-mail with a one-cent stamp; a busy chief executive might demand a dollar.
"In the regular marketplace, when you have something so fast and efficient that everyone wants it, the price goes up," said Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute, a think tank that favors market-based approaches.
"To think the Internet can shatter class distinctions that exist offline is "living in Fantasyland," Arrison said.
damn Marxist e-mail users. Shame on you all.
Posted by brad at March 5, 2004 01:39 PMComments
I see this evolving into a two-tier system on the user's end: allow free incoming email from permitted addresses, charge a fee for those of unknown origin. A long lost (i.e. not on the list)friend might have to pay once but I could reverse the charge and put them on my list. Fees would discourage mass mailing. Let a spammer pay me for access to my mailbox. (Earn money while working at home....)
Posted by: pw at March 6, 2004 09:45 AM
Ultimately, some sort of 'sender pays' system is probably the right way to go (Eric Allman recently wrote a good article on the Economics of Spam: http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=108 ), however I see Gates' specific proposal as being rather problematic, both w/ the technical aspects assymetric scaling of processing time and the huge number of zombies/botnets, and also the general functional aspects: how does this affect mailing lists, sales emails, etc.
Honestly though, does anyone really think it's a good idea to allow arbitrary 3rd party code to be running on your computer so you can send email?
(BTW, modern-day spam just turned 10 ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/36062.html ). Can't wait to see its unruly teenage years. [for more interesting spam history: http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html ])
Posted by: lhl at March 6, 2004 01:45 PM
