Bill Gates wants us to pay for email

[Speedo]

Hardly surprising, I guess.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/05/spam.charge.ap/index.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying "stamps" for e-mail.

Many Internet analysts worry, though, that turning e-mail into an economic commodity would undermine its value in democratizing communication. But let's start with the math: At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn't significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day. Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time.

Though postage proposals have been in limited discussion for years -- a team at Microsoft Research has been at it since 2001 -- Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Details came last week as part of Microsoft's anti-spam strategy. Instead of paying a penny, 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.

Time is money, and spammers would presumably have to buy many more machines to solve enough puzzles. The open-source software Hashcash, available since about 1997, takes a similar approach and has been incorporated into other spam-fighting tools including Camram and Spam Assassin.

Meanwhile, Goodmail Systems Inc. has been in touch with Yahoo! Inc. and other e-mail providers about using cash. Goodmail envisions charging bulk mailers a penny a message to bypass spam filters and avoid being incorrectly tossed as junk. That all sounds good for curbing spam, but what if it kills the e-mail you want as well?

Consider how simple and inexpensive it is today to e-mail a friend, relative, or even a city-hall bureaucrat. It's nice not to have to calculate whether greeting grandma is worth a cent. And what of the communities now tied together through e-mail -- hundreds of cancer survivors sharing tips on coping; dozens of parents coordinating soccer schedules? Those pennies add up.

"It detracts from your ability to speak and to state your opinions to large groups of people," said David Farber, a veteran technologist who runs a mailing list with more than 20,000 subscribers. "It changes the whole complexion of the net."

Goodmail chief executive Richard Gingras said individuals might get to send a limited number for free, while mailing lists and nonprofit organizations might get price breaks.

But at what threshold would e-mail cease to be free? At what point might a mailing list be big or commercial enough to pay full rates? Goodmail has no price list yet, so Gingras couldn't say. Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers, said spammers are bound to exploit any free allotments.

"The spammers will probably just keep changing their mailbox names," Cerf said. "I continue to be impressed by the agility of spammers." And who gets the payments? How do you build and pay for a system to track all this? How do you keep such a system from becoming a target for hacking and scams?

The proposals are also largely U.S.-centric, and even with seamless currency conversion, paying even a token amount would be burdensome for the developing world, said John Patrick, former vice president of Internet technology at IBM Corp.

"We have to think of not only, let's say, the relatively well-off half billion people using e-mail today, but the 5 or 6 billion who aren't using it yet but who soon will be," Patrick said.

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. Nonetheless, it will be tough to persuade people to pay -- in cash or computing time that delays mail -- for something they are used to getting for free.

Critics of postage see more promise in other approaches, including technology to better verify e-mail senders and lawsuits to drive the big spammers out of business.

"Back in the early '90s, there were e-mail systems that charged you 10 cents a message," said John Levine, an anti-spam advocate. "And they are all dead."

 

[SideshowBob]

Err, it's not that easy now is it. The big spammer and virus senders don't use the same e-mail adress from one time to another. AND as lots of viruses and spam crawl around the net looking for e-mail adresses and use them as senders. So shoudl we pay for the spammers too?

 

[IglooDame]

Actually (per the above article) Microsoft is proposing a processor-intensive calculation that for a single email would be a negligible strain on a mail server, but trying to send a million would require a LOT of server resources; his proposal has nothing to do with currency per se.

I don't think the idea will fly - the proposals regarding DNS adjustments in order to prevent spoofing are much more realistic, less intrusive, and don't require buy-in from every mail server on earth.

 

[stormbind]

It's topsy turvy. I already devised the solution

If you, as the reciever of the email, could choose to charge the sender $0.01 for the inconvenience of wasting your time. Spam would be down.

You cannot be a jerk and charge people who don't need to be charged, because it takes a lot of charges to convert $0.01 into an amount worthy of billing.

But in the case of spammers who send out millions or even billions or emails per day, the cost would be phenominal

Thus the result is..?

This was always my idea. Has big fat (c) on it (there is an artisitic quality) and was concieved years ago, but sadly it would require international legislation to enforce.

 

[Aphex_Twin]

$ .01 to send an e-mail is nothing, and indeed it would discourage spam. Still, who gets the money? Won't e-mails suddenly become more readily avalible to "interested" parties? Who writes the software to trace all those pennies? That last one is rhetorical.

 

[amadeus]

Who determines what "e-mail" is in the first place?

Electronic communication can be done so many ways, will there be a price put on AIM or ICQ?

Will online forums require PayPal registrations to pay a penny per post?

How about sending a ping? A ping is a string of data, how much will those be?

 

[stormbind]

$0.01 to send email is flawed. How do children or the poor with no credit cards manage? Is the www to become a domain exclusive to the rich?

It may not be expensive but that's no consolation to people who have bad credit and no means of paying online!

It won't work anyway because the spam filters are already there and are considered to add "privacy".

So if you can pay $0.01 to bypass spam filters then you are paying $0.01 to achieve an invasion of privacy! That won't be well recieved.

Not only that but disgruntled users will simply migrate to other email providers who don't have this "feature".

 

[stormbind]

Originally posted by rmsharpe
How about sending a ping? A ping is a string of data, how much will those be?

I didn't know you were against unregulated markets?

 

[amadeus]

If you can't afford $0.01, I think you should probably be doing something other than sending e-mails.

 

[IglooDame]

Originally posted by rmsharpe
Who determines what "e-mail" is in the first place?

Electronic communication can be done so many ways, will there be a price put on AIM or ICQ?

Will online forums require PayPal registrations to pay a penny per post?

How about sending a ping? A ping is a string of data, how much will those be?

I determine it, as a mail server administrator.

But to answer your question seriously: Email is the usage of the SMTP protocol over TCP port 25. Since spam is primarily an email problem, I can't imagine that they would roll it out to instant messaging or other communication protocols that aren't suffering spam issues.

That said, I don't think the penny-per-email approach can be successful anyway as the bookkeeping involved will be hideous.

 

[amadeus]

Originally posted by stormbind


I didn't know you were against unregulated markets?

You're way, way off base.

There is no way I'm in favor of price controls, for or against e-mail. If some private services wish to charge on a bandwidth basis or whatnot, that is fine by me, but I, like millions and millions of other users of online services would NOT use that.

 

[stormbind]

Who's to stop illegal mail (having a forged stamp) being sent from overseas?

 

[amadeus]

See, Igloo, he is targeting one industry but not the other. I am aware of what e-mail is, but I meant in the sense of general electronic communications, not the actual technical definition of the SMTP protocols.

 

[amadeus]

Originally posted by stormbind
Who's to stop illegal mail (having a forged stamp) being sent from overseas?

Interpol

 

[stormbind]

Once bill gates gets his foot in the door, it will be easy to apply charges to other forms of electronic data communications - this has been his long term plan, as demonstrated by the excessive investment in cable companies.

 

[RoddyVR]

i like the 10seconds of procesor time per email.
we could process the SETI stuff with email "payments", now THAT would be cool.
not only would we reduce the amount of spam, we would also find ET.

 

[IglooDame]

Originally posted by stormbind
Once bill gates gets his foot in the door, it will be easy to apply charges to other forms of electronic data communications - this has been his long term plan, as demonstrated by the excessive investment in cable companies.

But according to the article at the top of this thread, Microsoft is backing the proposal that covers processor utilization as the requirement to send email, not a small-amount-of-money-per-email plan. Besides, the penny-per-email plans generally feature the penny going to the recipient of the email, not the intermediary, and in fact the recipient generally has the option to not charge the penny if the email is legitimate.

 

[stormbind]

Originally posted by IglooDude
in fact the recipient generally has the option to not charge the penny if the email is legitimate.

That is my policy and afaik a policy unique unto me

 

[Turner]

Originally posted by RoddyVR
i like the 10seconds of procesor time per email.
we could process the SETI stuff with email "payments", now THAT would be cool.
not only would we reduce the amount of spam, we would also find ET.

I hope they do SETI. I've got like 1.25 years processor time since September '03. . . Free email for life! Woot! Oh wait, I already have that.

 

[IglooDame]

Originally posted by IglooDude
in fact the recipient generally has the option to not charge the penny if the email is legitimate.

Originally posted by stormbind
That is my policy and afaik a policy unique unto me

Such plans are frequently discussed on Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) and a quick Google reveals a Forbes article from July of 2003 noting the policy here: http://www.forbes.com/business/innovators/free_forbes/2003/0707/110.html

If you thought it up yourself, congrats, but it looks like either other people thought it up too, or they stole your idea.