On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 10:04 PM, Jerry Yeager remonstrated: > The end buyer (in the traditional advertising as you refer to it) also > pays for the advertising, it is a markup add-on that goes into > calculating the retail product price. See a commercial on regular > broadcast tv and buy the product? Part of the money you spend goes to > pay for the commercial (both making it and airing it) that sold you > the product. So really you get to pay twice, once for wasting the time > watching (or listening if you are a radio fan) commercials, then again > when you do buy something. Advertisers don't absorb that cost as just > part of doing business.
But, in the traditional case, you only pay when you buy. In the spam case, you pay whether or not you buy. I don't like paying with time and disk space for breast enlargement ads, although I'm happily expecting that shipment of uncut Nigerian diamonds to arrive any day now. >> I think the ultimate solution to spam will be some sort of >> micro-payment scheme in which it costs perhaps a fraction of a cent >> to send an e-mail. This will go unnoticed by most of us, but will end >> up costing spammers real money when they start sending a million >> messages. I'm sure the ISPs would like to start collecting 1/100 cent >> for every message sent through their servers. >> > > I like the idea as a starting place, but how do you avoid the problem > gateway maintainers holding email hostage until the tax is paid? Who > would be responsible for doing the bookkeeping? Also with the > additional overhead for accounting is a charge of 1/100 cent per > message realistically achievable or would it end up being more like 2 > or 3 cents per message? Lastly, this would slow down the small shops > that employ spammers, but how effective would it be against larger > outfits, other than making them insist that spammers are more careful > at verifying email address before the junk is sent. I think it can be done more or less automatically on the backbones. That's what computers are good at doing. Suppose everyone paid an Internet "tax" of $10 per year linked to a personal account. Every e-mail linked to that account debits the $10 by $0.001. That would let you send 10,000 e-mails before the $10 runs out. Without a valid return address, mail can't be charged and can't be sent. Use open key crypto to avoid spoofing. (It's about time everyone got a key pair, anyway.) Use the money to finance Internet research and the e-mail system; it's about time we started rolling out IPv6. If spammers had to verify the addresses to which they were sending their stuff, the problem would go away instantly. I'm getting spam on my cell phone because they don't have to verify addresses. They just send to all 10,000 addresses of the form 502741nnnn at vzw.com and automatically pick up the few cases where nnnn works out to be a real phone number. The others are just part of the non-cost of doing business because it's there's no cost for trolling. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be August 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
