Stamping out spam

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hitchcock.jpgEvery once in a while you come across a good idea so simple and obvious you kick yourself for not thinking of it first. A story in today’s NYT sort of had that effect on me. The solution to e-mail spam, it argues, is to charge postage.

I’m taking a class on the regulatory process with former FTC Chairman Tim Muris of do-not-call list fame. Last week he was talking to us about the list and how the FTC started looking at spam and realized that there was no good solution because the cost of spamming is practically zero. And there I was nodding my head, yup it’s unsolvable. But why not shift the cost to the spammers by charging a tiny per e-mail fee?

Well, first of all, it would be very unpopular, as evidenced by the perennial e-mail hoax about Congress considering a 5 per e-mail tax and the turmoil it causes. Second, who exactly would be collecting the fee? And how do we go about re-engineering the Internet to do it?

Obviously, it would be very difficult to do, but a one penny fee per e-mail sent would turn the tables on spammers. It would be negligible to consumers but very onerous for spammers. The NYT article suggests a non-monetary fee whereby computers are forced to spend 10 seconds seconds sending an e-mail. Again, this would be almost transparent to consumers, but it would monkey-wrench spammers. The problem with that system, it seems to me, is that it prohibits all bulk mailing and I don’t think that such mailing is bad per se. If Amazon wants to send out an e-mail to all of its gazillion customers to announce a new service, they should be able to do it. And pay for it.

Feb 13, 2005 | Comments

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