Are we ready for e-mail stamps?
YOU know spam is a big problem when Bill Gates talks about getting rid of it.
In fact, the Microsoft chairman and the world’s richest man made headlines recently by saying spam—or unwanted commercial e-mail—would be defeated in two years.
This, he said, could be done using technological and economic means.
Speaking earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gates said spam is plentiful because e-mail is free.
So why not charge postage for e-mail “stamps”?
The “stamp” would be “bought” with computing time, not cash.
Here’s how it would work.
To send e-mail, a user would have to have his computer solve a mathematical puzzle—a process that might take 10 seconds. Doing so would give him a “stamp” that could be verified by the recipient.
To most legitimate users, this would only be a slight delay. For spammers who send out thousands of junk e-mail messages, the delay would be crippling.
For example, to send just 1,000 messages, a spammer would have to devote 10,000 seconds or about 166 minutes or more than two hours. The more mail the spammer sends, the longer his computers will be tied up. At some point, so the argument goes, this would make it too expensive to send out spam.
Microsoft’s name for this approach is No Spam At Any Speed, but a similar technology called HashCash has been around since 1997.
Gates also proposed a system that would let e-mail recipients decide whether to accept legitimate e-mail for free or read spam but charge the sender.
An even more radical idea is to actually charge everyone for sending e-mail.
“Current solutions for spam still have one big problem: They put the burden of cost on the receivers of e-mail—ISPs, businesses and consumers,” writes Jim Nail, senior analyst at Forrester Research. “This is the wrong approach—and it won’t work. The best solution to spam is not legal, technical or regulatory—it’s economic. It’s time to charge for e-mail, making those who send bulk e-mail volumes pay for the resources their campaigns use.”
Forrester proposes that ISPs, marketers and e-mail marketing companies become member-owners of an association that would establish standards, set rates and oversee the network’s operations.
“ The charge for sending e-mail needn’t be high—even one-quarter of 1 cent per message would crush spammers’ business model,” Nail writes. “Forrester believes that the bulk of the money generated should go to ISPs and e-mail in-box providers like Hotmail—which incur the storage, bandwidth and filtering costs today. Individuals using e-mail for low volumes of personal correspondence would pay only if they exceed a reasonable threshold — say, 1,000 messages per month — the same way they pay for additional e-mail storage today on MSN or Yahoo.”
While it will take a lot of work to set up such a system, Forrester believes the savings and improved response to e-mail campaigns will more than make up for the costs.
For one thing, hard-core spammers will go out of business. “A charge of $2.50 per thousand messages would add $2,500 to the cost of a 1 million-message campaign, seriously undermining spam’s economics, in which names are acquired free through harvesting and sending e-mail costs as little as 10 cents per thousand.
Companies’ e-mail correspondence costs would also decrease, Forrester says. While companies would incur additional costs, they would save money in spam filtering, bandwidth and storage. Corporations that handle significant volumes of marketing e-mail would be eligible to receive a share of “postage” payments.
Gates and Forrester Research argue their case convincingly but their ideas stumble on some basic problems.
First, both proposals penalize legitimate users of e-mail for somebody else’s crime. Why should I suffer a 10-second delay or pay for e-stamps simply because some sleazebags use e–mail to mass-market Viagra on the cheap?
Second, to implement either proposal, you’d need a system that could verify the true identities of senders. But if you already had such a system in place, you could crack down on spammers without charging end-users.
Third, even a fraction of a cent— as Forrester suggests—may be too expensive for some users, particularly in developing countries. For example, a quarter of a cent is still 14 centavos. Do you really want to spend 14 centavos to send e-mail that you used to send for free? Those centavos add up.
The discrepancy becomes even more pronounced given that as much as 57 percent of the spam comes from the United States. Charging e-mail senders worldwide even a quarter of a US cent would put an unfair burden on users in developing countries for a First World problem.
Fourth, both proposals could end up penalizing the wrong people. The anti-virus company Sophos estimates that up to 30 percent of the world’s spam is sent from computers that have been taken over by hackers using Trojan horses and worms. Unsuspecting owners of these “infected” PCs would end up paying a steep price.
Other legitimate users would be heavily penalized too. For example, owners of mailing lists could face higher costs in terms of computing resources or cash.
Finally, turning e-mail into a commercial activity would undermine its ability to make information widely available. The Forrester proposal, in particular, goes against the free and untrammeled flow of information that helped shape the Internet in the first place. Charging for e-mail would certainly dampen its use, and make cyberspace a less democratic place for all.
Are we ready to trade this freedom simply to stop spam?
In my book, that’s a lousy trade.