On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 07:58:56PM -0500, John Morrow wrote: > Subject: Re: Do Not Call -- The newest public interest miracle? > > At 07:41 PM 7/1/2003 -0400, Wei Dai wrote: >> I can... The Do Not Call form should take a bank account number and dollar >> amount. Any advertiser who pre-pays the amount I specify would be >> allowed to call me. > > This is precisely a thought that occurred to me as a way to prevent spam -- > computers can reduce the marginal transaction cost, and liens could be put > up against bandwidth providers to take care of any lag in the > system. Would be spammers would sign contracts with their ISPs, and ISPs > with the agencies who kept track of costs for individuals and authenticated > email coming from contracted ISPs. A major problem is getting a critical > mass of people to use it, so that people are not missing email from users > of "hold out" ISPs.
See my article "Stamps vs Spam" for a proposal to implement this idea that arguably doesn't have a critical mass problem with respect to number of users: http://fare.tunes.org/articles/stamps_vs_spam.html [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ] [ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ] Please leave the State in the toilets where you found it.