A Better Way to Shoot Down Spam

We can stop SPAM in 10 minutes - just charge a penny per email. Make it economically unfeasible - like the US Post Office has with most types of junk mail - and you stop it immediately. And implementing it is simple - charge everyone a few extra bucks a month for the first couple of hundred emails they send so only the big users get billed.

But it will never happen - as Internet profiteers will never go for it - as I said - they make too much money off the Spammers.

It has nothing to do with profit, and everything to do with implementation.

Using the post office as an example is disingenuous. The post office is a monopoly. You cannot just set up your own post office, issue your own stamps, and expect letters you sent to actually get anywhere. The post office is able to charge people money for sending letters because you simply have no other way to send said letters. Yes, you could always use UPS or Brown or DHL, but these are massive companies that have required billions of dollars to set up. And you still have to pay to use their services. They can charge you because they control EVERYTHING from receipt of your letter from you, to its delivery at its destination. At no stage does it ever leave their control.

E-mail servers are a whole different ball of wax. When I set up an e-mail server, I am (quite literally) setting up my own post office. Using that server, I can send e-mail to anyone else in the world without having to rely on anyone else to actually "carry" that e-mail as an e-mail. In other words, the ISP's which own the fibre optic lines that make up the Internet wouldn't be able to tell my e-mail from a web page without directly inspecting the data packet. To do that with every data packet passing through their system would be cost-prohibitive, mainly because any data over a certain size (usually a fraction of what an e-mail or web page usually is) is broken up into many packets which can take any possible path between source and destination. To track and confirm an e-mail would require re-assembling the entire e-mail from its individual packets -- and packets may have bypassed their network entirely (by using a competitor's), rendering any re-assembly impossible. The Internet is based on a LACK of control... and that is its strength. If a network from, say, AT&T goes down, there is always the network from Sprint which can allow data to be re-routed around the blackout area. That way, no one ISP actually "controls" what goes over its network... it can throttle the data, but it cannot control it in any way which is reliable for everyone on the Internet. This lack of control - this flexibility, actually - is the very keystone of what makes the Internet reliable and resistant to interruption.

Plus, the barrier to entry for e-mail is so low. Setting up your own post office and postal network would require millions - if not billions - of dollars. Setting up a single e-mail server costs me nothing in terms of software (Linux) and may even cost me nothing in terms of hardware (cast-offs from people upgrading).

Then we get to the issue of who would collect your "penny per e-mail". Since I have just created my own postal service (e-mail server), and since the e-mail server connects directly to the recipient server to deliver e-mail, who would step in to demand payment? If the recipient is another "independent" like me, why should we even acknowledge the transaction? Who would be the central arbiter for collecting these funds, where would they go, and what rights would this central arbiter have to force independents like me to pay? Essentially, forcing senders of e-mail to pay would fracture and break up the Internet into the "haves" and the "have-nots".

And finally, there is the issue of inertia. E-mail is now so pervasive, and so broadly spread around the world, that any attempted implementation would be stillborn. Entire countries would refuse to play along (especially those poor countries struggling to improve their lot with the Internet - even a penny per e-mail would be too costly for citizens who might earn only a few hundred dollars per year). Businesses would balk. And individual consumers - especially those who are tech savvy - would be the biggest protesters. They would find ways around the pay system, rendering it impotent. Without 100% compliance from day one (and we are 34 years too late for that), setting up a "pay system" for e-mail would be impossible.