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Selling Your Attention to Spammers

Posted by timothy on from the sounds-fair-to-me dept.

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?"

3 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Yet another misguided solution by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. What is it with the money-for-email idea? by btempleton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
  3. Ah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    That pretty much explains it.