>>> The fundamental question remains - if a commercial e-mail sender pays >>> postage, to whom do they pay it? If they pay my ISP, they have not >>> adequately compensated me for my time. >>And Lands End compensates you for your time when you get a catalog from them >>that you didn't request? > > It's Orvis, not Land's End, thankyouverymuch :-) And no, they don't -
But it costs them around $1 to send it, so they have a real incentive not to send too many copies that just get trashed. > The fact that the sender sent it does not raise my taxes, nor > does it raise my postage. It does raise your taxes (or however you pay for trash disposal). > This is the crux of the difference between e-mail and postal > mail. With postal mail, volume does not transfer cost onto the > receipient(s) - only the sender(s). There's some cost to the recipient, but the sender pays by far the majority. It it cost $1 to send me spam, it wouldn't be a problem. It doesn't matter who'd get the $1. >>Wait - Yahoo *does* pay extra - to their bandwidth providers. > > No they don't. They pay their bandwidth providers the same monthly > bill that they have to, dependant upon how much bandwidth they've > purchased. Whether or not *you* or *I* get a popup doesn't change > the price of an OC-12 - unless they're configured for > bandwidth-on-demand, that is. Maybe they would need only 11 OC-12's instead of 12, if they didn't send the popup ads. (You can reasonably assume that they buy the amount of bandwidth they need. Now, if they were smart enough to configure their system to send the popup ads only when their bandwidth usage is low, that would be different.) > You're confusing the issue, Derek. Consumption of bandwidth is a > relatively unimportant part of the spam cost structure. The disk > space and people are much more expensive, and are more directly > relevant. The cases where an ISP is so inundated with spam runs that > they have to go out and buy more pipe is so rare (if not entirely > non-existent) as to be a non-issue. More important, even if that happens, the extra costs for disk exceed the extra costs for pipe by a lot. >>The goal of e-postage is to provide incentives where none exist. > > To whom is the incentive offered? The recipient ISP, or the recipient? > Or both? It doesn't matter. Either way (or pay some random third party), if spam costs approach a nonzero amount, the amount of spam drops precipitously. > Well, bartering is not a concept of linear time - rather a > characteristic of a specific period of market maturation, which is > not rigidly fixed to a timeline. I'd say rather that bargaining (not bartering) is an efficiency issue. Even the US still has it for large-ticket items like houses and cars, because it's worth the effort. > Actually, from a business analysis point of view, I might debate > that the additional (macro) variable cost of having barterers ready > for every potential customer would raise the > bartered-cost-to-consumer so high that the consumer would never be > able to get a better price than they do in the (micro) fixed-price > world. Sort of: it's the usage of their time, not merely having them available, that costs. (When you buy groceries, part of the price pays the checkout clerk's salary. If there were bargaining, that part would have to increase tremendously, at least on average.) Seth _______________________________________________ spamcon-general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.spamcon.org/mailman/listinfo/spamcon-general#subscribers Subscribe, unsubscribe, etc: Use the URL above or send "help" in body of message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
