E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail
Proposed alternate title: Bill Gates proposal has same effect as e-Viagra for bureaucracies around the world
If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers.
Isn’t that what happens now? My ratio of actual mail to unsolicited junk mail is about 25 to 1.
That’s why we get so much junk e-mail: It’s essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying "stamps" for e-mail.
....and free to delete as well. Its called a ’filter’ Bill, give a call to your Microsoft Outlook developers, they can tell you all about it. You’ll probably get voicemail as they are busy fixing a host of bugs that allow viruses in to take over my desktop, but that’s ok.
Many Internet analysts worry, though, that turning e-mail into an economic commodity would undermine its value in democratizing communication. But let’s start with the math: At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn’t significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day.
...its a penny today, by the time my kids go to college in 10 years, anyone want to guess what it will cost then? why, "its only a penny...." the mating cry of do gooders everywhere
Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time. Though postage proposals have been in limited discussion for years -- a team at Microsoft Research has been at it since 2001 -- Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
black helicopter followers , bildeburger theorists, jump on this one fast you guys. David Icke, call your office!
Details came last week as part of Microsoft’s anti-spam strategy.
apparently, Microsofts strategy doesnt say "fix the freaking OS in the first place"
Instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender’s good faith.
ooohhhhhh suuuuuuure it will....
Time is money, and spammers would presumably have to buy many more machines to solve enough puzzles. The open-source software Hashcash, available since about 1997, takes a similar approach and has been incorporated into other spam-fighting tools including Camram and Spam Assassin. Meanwhile, Goodmail Systems Inc. has been in touch with Yahoo! Inc. and other e-mail providers about using cash. Goodmail envisions charging bulk mailers a penny a message to bypass spam filters and avoid being incorrectly tossed as junk. That all sounds good for curbing spam, but what if it kills the e-mail you want as well?
oh well, what was that Lenin said about making omlettes? I forget....
Consider how simple and inexpensive it is today to e-mail a friend, relative, or even a city-hall bureaucrat.
uh, yeah, thats why WE LIKE IT
It’s nice not to have to calculate whether greeting grandma is worth a cent.
its also nice not waiting a fortnight to send a piece of paper down the street!
And what of the communities now tied together through e-mail -- hundreds of cancer survivors sharing tips on coping; dozens of parents coordinating soccer schedules? Those pennies add up.
and gosh if we make it a dime, well hell thats starts being real money. think of the good we could do with that. and heck, its only a dime, think of the children....
"It detracts from your ability to speak and to state your opinions to large groups of people," said David Farber, a veteran technologist who runs a mailing list with more than 20,000 subscribers. "It changes the whole complexion of the net."
He says that like its a bad thing doesnt he? who does he think he is?
Goodmail chief executive Richard Gingras said individuals might get to send a limited number for free, while mailing lists and nonprofit organizations might get price breaks.
as long as you bow down before the proper entity, you will be taken care of, I’m sure of it.
But at what threshold would e-mail cease to be free? At what point might a mailing list be big or commercial enough to pay full rates? Goodmail has no price list yet, so Gingras couldn’t say. Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s founding fathers, said spammers are bound to exploit any free allotments.
He Heap Big Smart Mammal. Me Like Him.
"The spammers will probably just keep changing their mailbox names," Cerf said. "I continue to be impressed by the agility of spammers." And who gets the payments? How do you build and pay for a system to track all this? How do you keep such a system from becoming a target for hacking and scams? The proposals are also largely U.S.-centric, and even with seamless currency conversion, paying even a token amount would be burdensome for the developing world, said John Patrick, former vice president of Internet technology at IBM Corp.
My solution? S&H green stamps.
"We have to think of not only, let’s say, the relatively well-off half billion people using e-mail today, but the 5 or 6 billion who aren’t using it yet but who soon will be," Patrick said.
A surprisingly high number of them will also appear to have relatives in jail in Nigeria.
Some proposals even allow recipients to set their own rates.
I do that already, its called ZERO.
A college student might accept e-mail with a one-cent stamp; a busy chief executive might demand a dollar.
Ok, now this is nonsense. Information is a two way street. Imagine how effective your cellphone would be if you charged your caller for every call they made to you.
"In the regular marketplace, when you have something so fast and efficient that everyone wants it, the price goes up," said Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute, a think tank that favors market-based approaches. To think the Internet can shatter class distinctions that exist offline is "living in Fantasyland," Arrison said. Nonetheless, it will be tough to persuade people to pay -- in cash or computing time that delays mail -- for something they are used to getting for free. Critics of postage see more promise in other approaches, including technology to better verify e-mail senders and lawsuits to drive the big spammers out of business. "Back in the early ’90s, there were e-mail systems that charged you 10 cents a message," said John Levine, an anti-spam advocate. "And they are all dead."
Please tell that to the aforementioned Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute.

I watched the movie "You've Got Mail" a few weeks ago. At the time it was made it was believable, and it wasn't made that long ago. Even though Mr. Gates sounds like he's looking for a way to make some money from it, I think it's a problem that'll go away nearly as abruptly as it erupted. The solution could well be legal: every piece of spam points to a website, every website has an owner, and an attentive government would shut down the relatively limited number of V1@gra peddlers and unacredited diploma mills if it really wanted to. Another method's technology. I use Spam Assassin now, and there seem to be only two major methods used that get around it, one of which is pretty easily overcome if somebody has the programming time to devote to it. I receive entirely too much spam — I spend a lot more time on controlling it than I do on reading the real mail I get, which isn't right. I don't want to spend additional time administering a pay-per-mail system and sending a rake-off to Bill Gates or the government.


Posted by: Frank Martin 2004-03-05
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=27524