On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Steve Schear wrote: > I guess you have unlimited time and consider your time worthless. Its not
That doesn't follow at all. I consider my limited time very valuble. I simply believe creating an artificial scarcity at the infrastructure level a bad way to address spam.
Barry Shein disagrees with me, but you're correct, as far as you go.
Trying to declare an artificial scarcity somewhere in the system, which almost all of the "sender pays sender's ISP" and some of the "sender pays recipient's ISP" systems do is doomed to failure, either because of evasion or bad social effects or whatever.
Finding a way to collect payments for using the real scarce resource, which is the recipient's time, at prices set by the recipient, has some chance of succeeding. There are of course many ways to fail, but it's at least not doomed from the start.
I'm mentioning Barry because he's done some recent and well-publicized
speeches about the spam problem and sender-pays. While part of his problem
may be that he's a liberal Democrat with the corresponding economic clues,
he's also run an ISP business for a decade longer than most of the competition,
so he's looking at it from an ISP perspective trying to find ISP-level solutions
to _his_ problems, which are inbound bandwidth and storage and marginal cost,
combined with the costs of managing user complaints about spam,
and he's got a pre-internet-boom cynical perspective on dumb ASP models.
But while Barry's an old ISP guy, I'm a old phone company guy. ISP-oriented systems, especially sender-pays-sender's-ISP systems, end up reinventing the settlements processes phone companies have used, and believe me, you don't want to go there again. They're bad enough when there's a monopoly that owns all the parts, or that owns the middle, but they're much worse in a competitive many-player system when people are trying to tweak them for social purposes rather than doing cost-driven economics, and they fail really badly at adapting to rapidly-changing technical environments and cost structures. If they start off knowing this, they can pick somewhat different failures than the ones the US phone system has, but that's still one of those "Knowing Murphy's Law doesn't help either" kinds of consolation. Doomed.
Bill Stewart
