> The intention is sender pays, recipient is paid, reflecting the > real scarcity of readers time. Mailing lists would be sent > out without postage, but with cryptographic signature, and > subscribers would have to OK it. Letters to the list would be > accompanied by payment, which would be something considerably > less than a cent, which would yield a profit to the mailing > list operators.
However, it penalizes everyone without an infrastructure for electronic payment. I don't own a creditcard suitable for Internet money transfers. I don't need it (and the USD/CZK exchange rate makes everything quite expensive), so for security reasons the option is disabled. Until recently, I hadn't a creditcard at all. What would I be supposed to do in order to send mail, then? What about public terminals, libraries? What about anonymous mails? Wouldn't it add either a high burden to the remailer operators, or nullify the remailer purpose, adding a shining payment trail right to the sender? What about improvised ad-hoc systems? When I have nothing other, I am able to send a mail with just a telnet client. Would it be possible with the new system too? It is another complication. Now not only the email infrastructure will rely on the Net itself, on the DNS and on the SMTP servers, but payment-transfer systems will be added to the equation, greatly affecting reliability. The idea smells bad.
