I was reading a discussion elsewhere about how Bill Gates said 2 years ago that Microsoft wanted to eliminate SPAM and people are noticing that the SPAM thing hasn’t exactly gone away. I recall that Gates made some kind of suggestion about people being charged by their ISPs for every email they send. At the time, I thought it was an idea worthy of consideration. The idea, as I understood it, was that ISPs would bill people a fraction of a cent for each email sent, perhaps after a fairly generous allowance of free daily emails. So, you might be billed a 10th of a cent, say, for every email after t he first 30. I’m making those numbers up. The idea is that email might cost an individual user, but the amount would be very small. On the other hand, SPAM-senders survive only by the ability to blast out TONS of emails. Tons and tons. So, the idea is that sending out emails to huge numbers of email addresses would be cost-prohibitive for spammers, but normal email use would not cost people much at all.
Because it came from Bill Gates, the headlines became “Bill Gates wants to charge you for email” and it all kind of went away.
I guess the devil would be in the details. There are companies that are legitimate and who send out tons of emails that people opt-in to. Might be cost-prohibitive for some of them.
Perhaps the biggest boost to SPAM is free e-mail accounts. Hotmail is a primary culprit, but there are many others.
As you noted, spammers send out millions of e-mails from thousands of accounts. Because it costs them nothing, they only need to make one or two sales per million e-mails to make everything worth their while. Charging per message would work, but as you noted, the slightest hint of doing this was re-interpreted in a negative light, and the notion was quickly killed.
The only other way to make spamming too expensive is to start charging monthly fees per e-mail account. Personally, I only use the one, but I know lots of people use several, either for business or family purposes, or just to be secretive (a certain Mini enthusiast with dog drool all over his seat covers comes to mind). These people may raise a hue and cry over this idea as well, but at some point people will have to accept that, like any attempt to enforce the rule of law, there is a cost to implement and maintain that law.
yeah - I’d think you’d need “personal” levels and “professional” levels. There are some emails I get that I’ve opted into (such as Crimewatchers) that I know go to a lot of people, and certainly couldn’t afford to pay a per email price.
Being a computer professional with nearly a couple decades in the industry now, I see a lot of challenges in implementing a pay-per-email scheme.
Free market economy. Email is already free. If ISPs started charging for it, there would be some that remained free, and spammers would flock to those. Enacting legislation may remove part of this problem, but not all. See #2.
The internet is global, and operating out of other countries is rediculously easy…for instance, this message board is run out of Canada. There’s no way to unilaterally get all countries to adopt this kind of scheme. Spammers would operate out of countries that did not charge.
ISPs already know who is sending out tons of emails. Why don’t they just block those poeple from doing so? Most spammers use mail-friendly ISPs, when they use ISPs the way we think of the term at all. Most of the time, they bypass ISPs altogether (see #4)
Becoming your own ISP. Most people think of an ISP as a company that provides you with a connection, as well as email, web space, etc. But really, that email and web space and stuff is just a perk. You mostly are paying for the connection. And if you have a connection, you can do anything an ISP can do. Anyone could set up their own web hosting and email hosting on thier personal computer. Some ISPs prohibit in their terms of service. Many don’t. For a while, my own website and email was run out of a server I built that sat in the living room. When I got hacked one time too many because I couldn’t get home in time to patch stuff when bugs came out, I moved to a tradtiional hosting company. But many spammers don’t push emails through their ISP’s mail host. They just open their own. Nothing stops them from doing so. Just the way email is defined on the internet.
viruses. Many computer viruses today aren’t written by kids out for kicks. Hackers see viruses as a business model. They take over your machine, and send out spam using your connection, and you don’t even know it. Would these poor victims then be charged all the money that ISPs would charge? Not to mention most of the time, these viruses bypass your ISPs email host altogether, as described in #4.
Open relays. In the early days, most email servers were open. Anyone could use them to send email. Now, most of them are closed: You have to have a name and password on that server (and also usually within that server’s IP domain) to send emails. However, there are still thousands of mail servers set up as open relays on the internet, either by design or by misconfiguration. New ones go up every week. There are websites devoted to sharing information on where to find them. Spammers use these all the time to make their mails hard to trace. So can anyone else, for that matter.
The emphemeral and mostly anonymous nature of data. Email is not mail. There is no envelope, no stamp, and no letter. There is nothing physical at all. It’s just a few packets of data. Any of the millions of machines on the internet can create those packets of data that wind up as an email in your mailbox. There’s no way to capture it, track it, and tax/charge for it on the scale described the way the internet is currently implemented. To control it more tightly would mean giving up a large amount of the freedom we curently enjoy on the Net.
The problem’s technological, actually. When the email protocol was
invented, it was built on top of a system called TCP/IP. TCP/IP is an
abstraction, meaning that the information an application tries to send
over the internet is broken into TCP packets, which all look the same
once they leave your computer. So, there’s no way for routers to
figure out whether a packet was part of a paid-for email, or an email
which was not paid for, or some .gif file you just requested from a
website…
Because of this, an ISP is not necessary to send email, all an ISP does
is pass TCP/IP packets along. You can setup a sendmail server on
your PC and send email all you want. There’d be no way to make
you pay for each email. So, if a charge were imposed, it would only
hurt those who couldn’t bypass the charge, and the spammers would
continue uninhibited.
What Wanderer says is true on a per-message charge basis, but everyone needs to come from an IP address. If ISPs and networks in just NA alone were to introduce per-account charging and reduced or eliminated spammers from their own servers, then it would start to become more obvious where the spam is coming from. Networks hate the way spam ties their resources up, too.
It would be much easier then to start blocking spamming IPs, causing some temporary distress to the inocent perhaps, but forcing all spammers to eventually give up their NA accounts. ISPs and networks have already shut out whole server ranges in China and Korea for spamming. The same thing could be done with remaining spammers if there was a concentrating effort by those with a will.
Per-account charge for what? Bandwidth? ISPs already do that,
although most home users won’t use enough bandwidth to find that
out (if you ever go over your limit, you will be either cut off or
bandwidth-limited until you sign up for a business plan). The
spammers just get a business account with enough bandwidth to fit
their usage needs. They make enough $$$ from the spam to cover
the extra cost of the account. And the ISP’s don’t care because
they’re making enough money from the business account to justify
the bandwidth used.
Not the ISPs I am familiar with. Their concern is that spam regularly chokes their mail servers. My ISP is also a network provider, and actively monitors mail usage to shut spammers down when found. I know that this is not the norm, but it could be, which is my point.
Yeah, I guess it’s the network providers who really could make the
change you’re talking about… I wonder if the backlash from certain
ISPs are what keeps this from happening?
Well, as I noted, whole networks were shut out on the network routers for a while against ISPs from Taiwan, Korea, China. The ISPs there bitched about it, but were forced to clean up their houses before they were allowed back in. It might be tougher to do this within a local network (more political clout).
Aren’t those state-run networks? Seems like that would make it easier…
Our network providers have customers to answer to (ISPs) who might
take their business elsewhere. Actually, that’s a good question: Are
the network providers monopolies? I would think there’d be a strong
geographic component, similar to the CableTV problem… Is there
sufficient competition along the backbone to indemnify the network
providers if they were to implement what you’re suggesting?
I can’t speak of the American network, but in Canada there are not that many network providers, with sellers and resellers regularly renting facilities from each other to try to present the image of having a larger network than they actually have. Putting in a data network approaches the billions over large geopgraphical areas, so there are not that many real players here. But I know the US participated in the blockade of Taiwan, so it can be done where there is a will.