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Why Isn't SPAM Regulated Like Fax?
byronne asks: "It seems like spam has escalated so much lately that it seems to actually become a quantifiable bandwidth waster. The less bandwidth available, the less productivity due to spam-dedicated bandwidth is lost. Being primarily a phone system transmitted medium, why can't unsolicited junk email be regulated and controlled like junk fax? Just a simple question that I haven't seen anybody ask or relate together." SPAM is becoming more and more of a problem with today's e-mail. I used to find e-mail a valuable tool for communication, but even with filters, folders and SPAM software, I spend more time culling my inbox than I do reading mail (and if I see one more mail with "allhallowmas" in the title, I'm going to go postal!). Is regulation the answer? Many people fear such a move, but might it be time to give it some serious thought?
Because SPAM has a marginal cost of $0, to both sender and receiver.
It doesn't REALLY cost anyone anything more that you're sending 100,000 pieces of mail versus 1000 to a campus-wide discussion group, EXCEPT for the time that the 100,000 people receiving it must spend deleting the mail.
Honestly, in this day and age a 2,000 byte e-mail is NO load on our servers or infrastructure.
It is a load only on the receiving party.
What I might like to see implemented though is this:
I will run a public in-box to which you must deposit 30 cents with each e-mail you send to it. My friends can just get it back at an appropriate time (since the micropayment architecture allows for zero-fee transactions, they're just entries in a database), or via the e-mails that I send to them in reply, and the businesses that I do business with can just charge me 30 cents more to pay for the privilege of learning about their product, but the businesses that I DON'T want anything to do with will either stop bothering me, or pay me nicely for my time -- I'll glance at 20 subjects, decide I'm not interested in any of them, and wa-la, I've made $6 in ten seconds.
This will have a bunch of good effects:
1. Illegal spam will be traceable to a source, since SOMEBODY's account is making me those micropayments.
2. I will see more products I'm interested in, since companies will have 0 cost of printing advertising materials, only the shipping. Whereas I get some interesting postal junk mail now, I will get more interesting junk e-mail if you remove the cost of printing. Also, instead of the advertisers paying the us postal service, they will be paying me.
3. I will be paid back for what I'm paying my ISP in order for it to uphold my end of the mail infrastructure.
4. etc.
It also shouldn't be that hard to establish this kind of a micro-payment system. Imagine this:
Here is a nonprofit company, xyz, that keeps monetary entries in a database, you can make any transaction for free, but you can only deposit or withdraw money in increments of $50. This keeps enough money in xyz's bank to pay, via interest, the transaction costs of writing out and receiving checks.
This is also a good way of paying artists. I'll send you 5 cents, and when enough people have sent you five cents, you can get a check out of it.
(Of course, to start sending people 5 cents, I will first have to deposit $50, but that's a small detail...also, if I REALLY want my $1.50 out, I can give it to someone I know who has over $50, so that the next time they take out money, they'll take out that much more and give it to me.)
We can even do it so that you don't even need to register to start receiving payments. I can simply mail cmdrtaco@slashdot.org $0.05, and he won't even know about it unless his e-mail receives more than $5, at which time he'll be reminded, once, via e-mail, that he has that much in, and that when it reaches $50, he can withdraw it. Authenticating the e-mail works the same way it does today for sending a gift-certificate to an e-mail address via amazon. You send an only-usable-once URL that requires information from the e-mail in which it appears in order to authenticate.
The best part is, a lot of e-mails might only ever receive less than $50, because people stop caring or the e-mail becomes shut down. In this case, the money just stays in xyz's coffers, to help finance the operation, until the end of time, or until the paying party retracts the money (since it is to an UNVERIFIED e-mail), whichever comes first.
It's a lot better than paypal, which "charges a transaction fee just for changing a number in one of its databases", to paraphrase someone I read on slashdot earlier.
What do we all think? Micropayments for everyone? (Miniature american flags for others.)
I know a BUNCH of famous people I'd instantly donate a dollar or two to, of whom presently I have only the e-mail address...
Marvellous...
(yes, voila.)
These laws date from back in the time when thermal fax paper was a significant tangible expense and people sending unsolicited commercial faxes were using a lot of it up.
See real-time (updated every 10 mins) status here.
(please be gentle. I'm only posting this because it's not on the main page...)
S
You sound like a spammer to me. :-)
Your solution does not solve the problem whereby Internet bandwidth is wasted. The mail still goes to the end-user's pickup point, where some user-defined rules reject it.
In addition, spam is a part of a technology/counter-technology process: you write a filter, then the spammer writes cleverer things to get around the filter. It is a Hard Problem to write a tool that correctly rejects the spam and correctly saves the non-spam. Obviously you don't have this tool to provide for us, so you handwave as though it already existed.
Yes, regulation will result in higher cost, but not necessarily in "incomprehensible rules," nor will it necessarily "hinder normal use." Fax rules are pretty clear, and work well. We have regulations for various services because we need them. Why else would our phone system be regulated? Because the Ma Bell is a dirty greedy company that wants desperately to cut corners and provide us with inadequate service in order to raise profits. So with e-mail; prevent its abuse so that we can have adequate service and an unnecessarily diminished infrastructure.
The real problem is that spam costs the spammer nothing; the real costs are borne by the receiver and his intermediaries. A similar thing happened with fax adverts, where people were getting pages and pages of junk, using up paper (expensive!) and preventing the real faxes from getting through because the whole roll was used up before the night was through (though the sender might have had to pay phone charges). Junk p-mail behaves better because the costs are borne by the sender; p-mail advertisers are remarkably efficient in targeting end-users, using bulk-mail rates, and so on.
Maybe ISPs should charge for number of recipients that a sender sends to, but even this seems a Hard Problem with remote distribution lists appearing as a single recipient. But it seems to me that until the sender starts bearing some costs for extra recipients, the spam problem will remain.
--dv
Insert witty saying or aphorism here.
But that I recall, this bill was more or less forgotten on the Senate floor.
This sig no verb.