Re: [Asrg] E-postage from first principles

Barry,

This sounds like accreditation, not e-postage.

Yakov

Barry Shein wrote:
> I don't find compensating recipients interesting or relevant so that's
> a straw man. Does the post office charge postage soas to pay
> recipients? W/o stretching the point?
> 
> Anyhow, e-postage is a way to make the price reflect the usage.
> 
> Here's another simple outline that would not be subject to all these
> straw man arguments:
> 
> 1. A stamp is a cryptographic signature identifying the ISP affixed to
> e-mail.
> 
> 2. The certificate for creating such stamps is bought by the ISP from
> approved certificate-issuing authorities, much like SSL certs at least
> in theory.
> 
> 3. The cert is issued for some rough amount of email, 100K/day,
> 1M/day, etc. and the price reflects that. The ISP will in some
> industry-agreed upon way provide some basic evidence that the cert is
> probably about right. This can be verified via auditing, sampling,
> etc., basic business records might help (everyone knows AOL has
> whatever, 2.5m customers, no one would believe them if they said they
> only plan to send 100,000 mail msgs per month, etc.)
> 
> Similar sampling-based methods (to keep things reaonably honest) have
> been used for over 75 years for radio music royalties, also similar
> systems are used for trade magazines subscription/ad ratios, etc. so
> if you're not familiar with examples such as those look into it
> because it would seem to be a rich source of ideas.
> 
> The important point is that you don't have to be absolutely accurate,
> just accurate to a degree, i.e., not buy a 100K/day cert when
> intending to send 10M/day. Getting caught cheating should be fairly
> serious. Obviously a simple mistake can be fixed etc (oh don't jump on
> it there are many business contracts where you have to
> estimate/project usage and then settle up later.)
> 
> 4. Recipient ISPs (and end-users for that matter, tho it's not
> necessary) can verify the authenticity of certs and if they like
> verify that a cert hasn't been revoked (one might do this with an
> authority server for every 100K uses or once a day or hour, the
> downside isn't all that serious usually.)
> 
> 5. Recipient ISPs can choose to do what they like with email msgs
> without good certs. They might deliver them, but they might be advised
> to (after some transition period) reject them because that's what
> would make the system work.
> 
> 6. ISPs may pass these costs along to their own customers however they
> like, that's a marketing decision. Most likely they'd allow some
> number of msgs "for free" (included in basic acct fee) and charge for
> usage beyond that. They might sell a mailing list package for $20/mo
> extra that includes another 100K msgs/mo, whatever.
> 
> 7. But the important point is that ISPs would be highly motivated,
> assuming a reasonable cert price structure, not to allow customers to
> send millions of msgs per day unrestrained. How they handle accidents
> or break-ins would be their own choice of policy, but they might be
> well-advised to practice some leniency if they wish to keep their
> customers happy.
> 
> I don't see any settlements, per-message real-time interactions,
> onerous book-keeping, etc in any of that.

--
Yakov Shafranovich / asrg <at> shaftek.org
SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc. / research <at> solidmatrix.com
"And this too shall come to pass"

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