Selling Your Attention to Spammers

Dotnaught writes "Can the free market stop spam where technology has failed? As described in InformationWeek, Professor Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University School of Management has co-authored a soon-to-be-published paper that proposes an "attention bond" -- money put up by email senders that recipients collect only if they consider the message a waste of time. Supposedly, this market-based filter performs better than a perfect technology-based solution, with no false positives or negatives. A company called Vanquish already has a working model. Is selling one's attention the answer to spam?"

Comments

How is this a solution again?

[TripMaster Monkey]

I must be missing something...it seems like the same tactics spammers use to evade law enforcement today could be used to evade the imposition of this "attention bond mechanism".

Human Greed...

[Ochu]

I'm sorry, the whole "fee" idea just doesn't work for me... What is to stop someone signing up for a whole load of mailing lists, and then claiming that they were all a waste of time? The only time anyone would not bother taking that cash is if there was someone they knew on the other end, getting pissed off.

Yet another misguided solution

[lukewarmfusion]

It sounds like a good idea, but it's not a solution any more than CAN-SPAM. Spammers will not cooperate if it's just going to hurt them. Until you crack down on spam in the same way that the telemarketer do-not-call list has, you won't see any improvement. And that's not even realistic given the ease with which email can be masked or forged.

It's similar to the argument that gun rights advocates make - stricter gun control laws or programs will hurt legitimate owners, but the real problems will still lie with the criminals who don't abide by those laws anyway.

Crack down on spammers. Make spam outright illegal and make penalties for ISPs that fail to comply.

Different financial cost

[grahamsz]

While it'd be inconsequential to me to put up 10c to send each message (or probably even $1 if my employment related emails didn't count) it doesn't scale well between different countries.

Third world countries will find that sort of money a huge barrier to entry for sending email.

Similarly this will be open to google ad type exploitation. People will set up email addresses and sign up to all sorts of solicited and unsolicited email just to collect the cash. Again for people in poorer countries this might be a practical job.

What is it with the money-for-email idea?

[btempleton]

While it's not a great idea, it's a fairly obvious one. Papers on this go back decades. I was one of the earliest to propose it in the Unix community almost a decade ago, but later denounced my own ideas.

But what amazes me is that like clockwork, somebody will publish an article on this "great new idea" for dealing with spam, several times a year it seems. They have clearly read none of the spam literature, nor done a search. And on top of that, journals and magazines also think it's new and publish the items, even slashdot publishes them.

What gives?

Ah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, I see...
Professor Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University School of Management

That pretty much explains it.

Re:Should be a money-maker

[merdaccia]

RTFA. The premise is that once you mark an address as spam, the sender will no longer send you messages because it's against his economic interest to pay you again. Therefore, you only receive payment once per mailing list, which will be too small to make it a feasible source of income.

Unfortunately, this system will only work if you only allow incoming mail from a server that supports it. This reduces the whole setup to a glorified whitelist, and dooms it to failure. Spam can't be stopped because the current infrastructure allows spammers to send mail without reprimand, and no alternative will work until the current infrastructure is still in place.

Re:brilliant, but complicated

[YrWrstNtmr]

Brilliant? No.

Overly complex, ineffective, and useless.

Who collects and distributes these (micro)payments?
Who enforces that the mailserver supports this?
In the event of someone getting zombied, who is liable? Especially in the event that the zombied box is fully patched.
How does a 13 year old from a dirt poor country send an email from the shared village PC to a uni professor in London or NYC? Where is his escrow acct?
What about anon email accts? How is my bank/paypal/whatever tied to that? (Not that I want it that way)
How does a free, but popular mailing list afford the escrow acct needed to cover new recipients?

There are a host of other problems that we haven't even begun to consider.

RTFA - You're incorrect too. Here's why

[billstewart]

You've either failed to read the article, or misunderstood it, though you were closer than the first checklist. A well-designed market-based solution doesn't suffer from many of the points you've checked, because it recognizes that it's the recipient's time that matters (though the article incorrectly tries to describe the time as a "property right" rather than a "service", which leads in various non-useful directions.)

() Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
-- it doesn't appear to use this - it appears to be recipient's-end charging, which can be deployed in a decentralized manner
() Open relays in foreign countries
-- those don't matter here - if they sender doesn't pay, the recipient doesn't read it, and relays only make it harder to pay.
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
-- you correctly marked "whitelists suck", which is part of why it's hard to implement this one correctly.
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
-- this is the big problem with TMDA, hashcash, and many similar systems
(*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
-- you missed this one too. See previous.
() Requires too much cooperation from spammers
-- not a problem. This one requires cooperation from non-spammers.
() Unpopularity of weird new taxes
-- unless I grossly misread the article, this doesn't apply here - the sender pays the recipient or recipient's ISP, not some third party.
(*) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
-- Yup. Either you need weird new money or old-fashioned real money, and the latter is usually too expensive per transaction.
(??) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
-- Maybe. If enough people start using this, and there's a convenient mail-sender interface so senders don't need to pay attention very often, then worms will start to abuse it. Otherwise they won't care, and the five people who still use it will have whitelisted each other.
() Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
-- Doesn't hurt the recipient, who sets the price high enough that he's willing to read an occasional Nigerian Herbal Fake Vi***a ad and keep their $5 just to annoy them. This proposal suffers from dishonest recipients, who convince legitimate that they should be willing to pay the money to get the recipient's attention. It's a serious enough problem that it can even lead to "Make Money Fast By Reading Email At Home" spammers inviting you to become a recipient :-)
() Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
-- Because you want me to read your mail. Don't care? Don't send money, and I'll ignore you. If I'm a sufficiently interesting public figure, like Rush Limbaugh or Daily Kos or the Editor of the New York Times or Britney Spears, maybe you'll pay to get my attention. Alternatively, maybe the fact that I'm charging for my attention will make you think I'm some over-inflated ego who's not worth the effort, and my 15 minutes of fame will time out faster.

(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
-- My conclusions's a bit more positive than yours :-)