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.
