[Asrg] Email Postage (was Re: FeedBack loops)

[Barry Shein]

On November 13, 2008 at 12:16 pbaker at verisign.com (Hallam-Baker, Phillip) wrote:
 > Actually the underlying intellectual conceit of market fundamentalism is that the market is a perfectly tuned feedback loop.

No one said anything about "market fundamentalism". Charging zero is
not communism, and charging something is not unbridled capitalism.

 > In this case the value to me of sending this email to this list is rather less than the value a spammer would obtain through successful spamming. The value to me of sending this message is almost certainly negative: if I had to pay to send it I would almost certainly occupy my time more profitably doing something else. Ergo there is no price regime that has the desired outcome.

Ergo shmergo, that presumes a particular pricing regimen, set up the
straw men and knock 'em down.

It is not uncommon for spammers to send 1 billion msgs / day.

Presumably that's somewhere in the range they need to be successful
(by their own measure.)

So if I limited you to 1 million messages per day (for free, after
that you pay) perhaps you could operate as you do now but the spammers
would be out of business.

Or maybe 1,000 msgs/day, etc.

Ergo, you're talking nonsense.

 >  
 > and then there is the fact that in the fifteen plus years I have been looking at micropayments, nobody has proposed a scheme that looks remotely viable to me as a solution in this instance.

More straw men. Nobody mentioned micropayments.

Your sentence can be reduced to: No postal system or non-free
telephone system (etc.) can possibly work, it would require
micropayments and I am certain no such scheme is viable.

Ergo, failure to understand reality is not reality's fault.

 > We do not need to charge for inappropriate use of email, we only need to penalize inappropriate use.

And thus is borne the underlying police-state impulses of uncharged
schemes. Since it's all free the only way to control its use is to
hang overconsumers in the town square.

No, I say there is a compromise. Reasonable, personal usage can be
"free" (i.e., disappears into other charges), commercial, bulk usage
can be charged.

The problem is we've drunk the kool-aid (fitting, jonestown 30th
anniversary is November 18th) and have come to adopt an assumption
that there is "good" commercial bulk email and "bad" commercial bulk
email.

Again, look at your postal system, they have a notion of commercial
mail, do they deliver commercial mail the recipient wants for free?

It's really not that hard.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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