Re: [Asrg] Another criteria for "what is spam"...

On Thursday, Jun 5, 2003, at 15:25 US/Eastern, Vernon Schryver wrote:
> Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com>:
>> ...
>> If CNN's recipient list meets the criteria you outline then the bulk
>> mailing must be delivered for free and without interference.
>>
>> Who exactly is to provide these bottomless resources is not your
>> concern, resources must be provided because it'd be FAIR, and we all
>> know the world is free of starving children, people w/o proper medical
>> care, and victims of despots, because if it's FAIR then it's field of
>> dreams, the resources must appear. ....
>
> That and the following is equivalent to UPS whining about the cost of
> delivering all of those packages.  Instead, the people who solicited
> CNN's stuff should be paying you just as they also pay you for the
> GBytes of dirty pictures they fetch with FTP and HTTP and the GBytess
> of pirated MP3s they fetch with "file sharing" protocols.
>
> Or do you run one of those ISPs that claims to provide something for
> nothing?

Charging the recipient is never going to work.

Even assuming for the moment that we could magically solve the problem 
of unsolicited e-mail, such that users would only get charged for stuff 
they had actually asked for, there's an insurmountable problem: the 
companies who want to do marketing on the Internet will never go for it.

Reason being, nobody (plus or minus a handful of people) will pay to 
receive marketing messages. Which means that if your vision of 
receiver-pays happened, e-mail based marketing would die a rapid death.

Many non-marketing mailing lists would die rapidly too. How many 
mailing lists that you subscribe to would you still subscribe to if you 
had to pay by the message? Would you even subscribe to *this* mailing 
list if every e-mail was costing you money?

Users don't like per-message or per-minute receiving fees on services 
they pay for. Look at mobile phones--the US has lagged behind Europe in 
mobile phone usage because users must pay by the minute to *receive* 
calls.

How much junk mail would you agree to receive if you had to pay the 
USPS for received mail? In fact, early on the postal system was 
"recipient pays". That scheme fell apart in no time.

mathew

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