[Asrg] Re: Pay-for-attention (Was Re: article on spam)

At 11:20 PM -0400 5/25/03, mathew wrote:
>On Thursday, May 22, 2003, at 17:13 US/Eastern, Shannon Jacobs wrote:
>>If you know of an anti-spam email system that will block any advertising
>>UNLESS the advertisers pay MY price for MY time, then please tell me about
>>it. I'll sign up and consider my spam problem solved.
>
>Yes, this strikes me as exactly the right model.
>
>People I know get to mail me for free.  Everyone else has to pay a 
>fee *I* set if they want to contact me.  I'll call it "postage" in 
>the discussion below, for want of a better word.

The problem with this is that it flips the identity problem on its 
head.  Now instead of everyone wanting to know the identity of the 
spammer, the advertisers will all want to know the identity of the 
recipient.  (As in, what actual person is behind the email address.) 
They'll want this, at the very least, to avoid fraud.  Because all of 
a sudden the economics are reversed.  There will be groups of people 
doing the exact inverse of spammers.  They'll be registering lots of 
domains, signing up for lots of sites, and then raking in the money.

>In fact, I'm rather surprised nobody has built something like this 
>already. It seems pretty obvious. Maybe there's some massive flaw 
>I'm missing, hence this

Why should they?  For the most part legitimate advertisers get 
through fine and free.  And like most of these systems, it all 
depends on how good your whitelisting system is.  I certainly can't 
reject email based on whether someone is in my address book, so at 
the very least it goes into a hold queue where I scan it.  And that's 
all the spammers need.  So they can continue to send spam.  So what 
have we gained?
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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