From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jul 15 2003 - 10:12:29 MDT
--- Benoît Mussche <benoit.mussche@pandora.be> wrote:
> On Monday 14 July 2003 23:49, Michael S. Lorrey wrote:
> >> Eeeeuw, are you on drugs ? That would be the greatest victory for
> >> spammers ever: hit our essential liberty to communicate freely
> >> as much as we want for a nominal fee.
> >
> > Exactly how do spammers "win" this way?
>
> Spammers cripple our freedom to communicate (at least if you don't
> hide your address from the web/usenet and aren't using a good
> spam filter) by ruining it for their own selfish purpose. I am
> pretty confident that spammers are the bad guys in this case and
> that i am not fooling myself in believing deleting all spam is for
> the good of the tribe. By charging the number of emails sent, you
> cripple our ability to communicate as well, thus are going the
> spammers way.
This is horse puckey. You do not cripple the ability of anybody to
communicate but those who send millions of emails, which means
absolutely NOBODY but spammers. For those on large email lists, it
might be a LITTLE pricey, but not so much that it does anything more
but improve the signal to noise ratio.
For example, if the charge per email is, say, $0.0001, I would pay ten
cents per post to an email list that has 1000 members. That is less
than a third of the cost of sending one snail mail letter to ONE person
(if you only count the postage). It is a minor amount, but enough so
that a person is going to put some thought into what messages he or she
sends, rather than just repeating 100 stupid jokes of the day to their
entire address book all the time.
Email lists may allow members to opt to accept mail from the list
"toll-free". The point is that the abilty to charge per email should be
in the hands of the email recipients, not the senders. My inbox belongs
to ME, not you, and I pay good money for that inbox (or else I agree to
accept advertising in lieu of payment, a la my yahoo account). It takes
me significant amounts of time to keep the limited space of that
mailbox free of garbage and unwanted messages, time I could be spending
on productive enterprises. It therefore costs me money every time YOU
send me a message. I deserve to decide whether I want to be compensated
for that waste of my time.
If you really want me to read something I don't want to read, you are
going to have to pay me some small amount to do so. If I find your
posts interesting, I can choose to give you toll free access to my
inbox. Similarly, a sender should be able to have a setting on their
message to refuse to deliver to any mailbox demanding payment for
receipt.
In the above example, if a spammer is charged $0.0001 per email, it
would cost him $100 per million messages sent. 100 million messages =
$10,000. This would quickly shut down all of the illegitimate spammers,
leaving only those who have a signficant commercial interest and
ability to pay, who are used to paying for other direct marketing
methods. These would be companies with concern for their public image
and are responsive to stockholders and consumers.
> We already pay a fixed fee for our Internet
> connection. Most subscription have a user quota (eg, mine is 10GB
> over last 30 days with max. 15% upload), which leaves me virtually
> inifinite numbers of mail i may send to communicate with friends
> and contacts, for the same monthly fee. Only transfer of large
> data amounts may be extra charged, which i understand. However
> text communication is bandwidth sparing and should in no way be
> overcharged.
The charge is not for bandwidth use, it is for wasting the time of the
recipient. You DO NOT own their inbox, and have no right to pollute it
with your mail for free, no matter how important or frivolous the
reason.
> The more i communicate over email the less costy
> each email is, other net services aside. My academic interests
> are duely served by this wonderful technology. If my ISP starts
> to charge even one extra eurocent per mail i'll be reluctant and
> feel less free to send emails to anyone. It would be the end. OTOH
> making the other end pay with free passes for your friends is no
> good idea either because it could kill new virtual relationship in
> the bud.
Crap. Any relationship that is not worth a penny is a relationship that
isn't worth anything to begin with.
=====
Mike Lorrey
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
- Gen. John Stark
Blog: Sado-Mikeyism: http://mikeysoft.zblogger.com
Flight sims: http://www.x-plane.org/users/greendragon/
Pro-tech freedom discussion:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/exi-freedom
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