The problem of spam worsens each day, and a recent conference on spam concluded with no real solution. There is much talk of a federal law to outlaw spam, but that will surely be watered down by the Direct Marketing Association, and will be unenforceable because spammers will simply move overseas. Yet the solution, it seems to me, is really quite simple.
I propose that the major ISPs (say, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL) form a consortium with the express purpose of defeating spam. Basically, members of the consortium accept emails only from each other, and senders of email must pay $0.01 per email sent, plus $0.01 per hundred kilobytes of data sent. That's the basic idea. Now for some details.
The payments are made directly to the recipients of the emails; in other words, if anybody wants to send you an email, they must pay you a penny for the privilege. The money that you accrue from this will normally go to defray your monthly payment for your Internet service, and thus will involve little financial overhead. If you're paying $20 per month for your Internet service, then you'd need to receive 2,000 emails per month to completely defray the cost of your service. That's 60 messages a day -- more than twice what I receive each day, including spam. If spam is eliminated by this scheme, then it is extremely unlikely that ISPs will have to cut checks each month to any of their customers. The money will mostly be virtual, floating around inside the account systems of the ISPs, but never requiring transactions through banks...
except for people who send lots of emails. Most consumers will be net recipients of email and so will simply enjoy a slight reduction in their Internet costs. People who send out mailings to mailing lists, however, will have to pay some money. But even their costs will be minimal. My Erasmatazz mailing list has just a few hundred names on it, so it would cost me just a few bucks to send out a mailing. If Mom & Pop SmallTime Internet Sales Company wants to send out a mailing to, say, 10,000 customers, that cost them only a hundred bucks -- well within reasonable marketing costs. Even if Monster Megacorp wants to send a mailing to its million customers, that would cost them $10,000 -- again, a reasonable cost for Monster Megacorp.
But look how the economics change for Snidely Spammer. He wants to send out 10 million emails in the hope of getting a return of 0.1% -- one in a thousand, which is actually quite high for spam. That 10 million spam emailing will cost him a cool $100,000, and will return 10,000 responses. He has to make $10 profit per customer just to cover his marketing costs. The economics just don't work. Snidely Spammer is out of business.
Now to address the various gotchas. Gotcha #1: you can't get email from people whose ISPs aren't part of the consortium. There are two responses to this: first, as soon as a few big ISPs set up the system, almost everybody else is going to want to hop onto the bandwagon. After all, it's a huge competitive advantage to be able to offer spam-free email. And it's certainly a huge competitive disadvantage to be locked out of sending emails to half the known Internet universe. I think we can be confident that ISPs will join up as fast as they can. But there's a second response: permit consumers to opt out of the system during its startup phase. In other words, your ISP offers the service, but you don't have to participate. You still get all the spam, and you don't get any money for it, but you can still receive emails from people all over the world.
Gotcha #2: this system will impose some administrative costs on ISPs. They'll have to install accounting software to keep track of emails sent and received. They'll have to modify their servers to automatically reject emails that don't make the grade. They'll have to develop procedures to discourage spammers who grab an account, send out a million emails, and then disappear without paying. Note, however, that these are software costs, and so are subject to the huge economies of scale that software systems enjoy. The big operators will find the costs negligible, and the little ISPs need only purchase the standard software package that somebody will surely develop. However, if these costs prove to be significant, then there's no reason why ISPs can't deduct some percentage of the payments to cover their costs. Competition will keep them honest.
Gotcha #3: This will shut down a number of honorable uses of mass email. For example, there are plenty of non-profit organizations that will have to pay money for what was once free. And Uncle Fred will probably think twice before sending out the pictures of his vacation to New Jersey to every cousin and in-law on his mailing list. And people who need to send 10 megabyte files will have to pay $1.00 each time they do so.
But these aren't serious injuries. The non-profit organization need merely prune its mailing list using the same techniques that they have used for years to prune mailing lists for snail mail. Indeed, if you compare this system to snail mail, you can see its merits instantly: it's just like snail mail only faster, cheaper, and less graphically splendiferous. Because there's a cost associated with it, senders must make some effort to target their recipients, rather than just sending out random spam.
A reader pointed out that this scheme would also mean the end of newsgroups. I agree, but that might not be such a bad thing. Remember, newsgroups were spawned before the Web, when everything over the Internet was done by email. Nowadays we have excellent website discussion boards that provide everything that a newsgroup can give and more. They are automatically archived, searchable, and easily accessed. They are more accessible and they make it easier to avoid repetitive discussions. Most important, website discussion boards are strictly voluntary; you don't see anything unless you ask to see it. There's no spam piggybacking its way into your vision, as can be the case with newsgroups.
Here's where we come to the underlying merit of this idea: it quantifies a previously under-estimated economic variable: the attention of the consumer. Radio and television have operated on this principle for decades: if we can entice your attention with good programming, then we can sell that attention to advertisers. Many Internet portals operate on the same principle. This scheme extends the concept to email and quantifies it. My time is worth money, and if somebody wants to get my time and attention, they should have to pay for that privilege, either in services provided or cash paid.