And another two cents
Since it was linked from last week’s NTK people other than Googlebot have read a post I made in May about tightening SMTP standards and I’ve begun to get some feedback.
One correspondent questioned the validity of using SMS-spam as some indication that micropayment systems wouldn’t necessarily deter spam. It’s a fair point, I suppose. Message charges are set (and collected) by the sender’s service provider and can traverse to recipients on other networks. Bulk message senders are free to shop for the cheapest service provider and thus pay a fraction of the usual cost. Surely any charging system designed for email would feature negotiation (automatic or not) directly between the sender and the receiver?
Well, yes. A well thought-out proposal could feature this. But I don’t think you’d ever see it adopted. There’s a lot of discussion and a lot of proposals flying around, and I’m not au fait with them, but I haven’t seen anything to convince against the following:
- any widely deployed currency-based per-message charging will ultimately be set and collected by the sender’s service provider
- currency-based charging will never be successfully integrated into the existing global SMTP infrastructure
It’s not that I don’t think it’s technically feasible to implement a fair sender/receiver currency-based charging system globally, I just don’t think it’s politically feasible.
Imagine all the email you get in a day. Subtract all of the mailing list traffic. Subtract all of the mail that comes from addresses in your address book, addresses you have mailed, and addresses from which you have received legitimate mail from in the past. This is the mail that can be white-listed (ignoring the issue of spam infiltrating mailing lists for now). What you have left is the problem – probably 99% of it spam, and what’s left after that is legitimate “initial contact” mail from new addresses. The problem isn’t separating the spam from the mail, the problem is separating the “initial contact” mails from the spam.
(Yes, the ability to forge identities can reduce the effectiveness of a whitelist approach. The solution to that problem isn’t payment, but rather the adoption of signing. Public-key based message signing at the client side, TLS on the delivery side - where some use can eventually be made of certificates for authentication and trust relationships.)
You wouldn’t want your friends and contacts to be charged for the privilege of emailing you (well I wouldn’t), so that leaves the spam and the “initial” mails. The ideal charging level is that which doesn’t dissuade legitimate correspondence but does dissuade unwelcome commercial messages. Does such a level exist? I have no doubt that any cost barriers that are introduced will have a direct effect on the amount of unwanted commercial messages, but I don’t know that there’s a level that produces a neat line separating the two. I have always received more (paper) junk mail than normal mail, thankfully nowhere near the depressing ratio of spam to email,yet what value of postage stamp would dissuade me from, say, informing a random webmaster of a minor mistake on their site?
I consider the idea that some middle-ground would thrive – that, for example, busy executives would charge large amounts to receive email - to be fanciful. It’s usually the fear of the odd overlooked gem that has rendered anti-spam techniques impotent. A salutation from a long lost friend with the subject “Hi”, an important business mail sent out-of-hours from the kid’s computer, that domain renewal reminder. Most people would apply no charge on the things they want to read, and a bajillion dollars on spam. And if there’s mail you don’t want to read but have to? Chances are you’re being paid to read them already – get back to work.
So if you price too high for the spammers, no money changes hands. And if you set a price of nothing for your friends, no money changes hands. Whoa, hold on! To the Internet Service Providers this is a potential Critical Revenue Source. If they’re going to have to develop and deploy these system (assuming they aren’t out-of-band charging systems) their slice of the pie is going to have to be worth something.
In fact, why wouldn’t it be their pie? Why can’t your Service Provider bill for email like the phone company bills for calls, or SMS messages. An analog to the phone company, while possibly flawed in the network sense, is clear. It’s their systems that will be handling the mail, their systems that will likely negotiate the financial transactions, and it’s they who receive the complaints when things go wrong. If anyone’s going to benefit from email charges it’s going to be them. And while we’re at it, why would charges be the ”nominal” amounts that proposals promise. Why wouldn’t they be whatever the market will accept (which will be some point between significant and insignificant – more that nominal by definition).
It’s often said of phone companies that it costs them more to bill for a call than it does to facilitate it. I can guarantee that will be the case, many times over, for email.
One of the effects of the big players arriving late to the email party is that, while it’s difficult for any of them to unilaterally dictate the community’s technical standards, it’s easy for them to stymie the adoption of new ones. If your proposal doesn’t sit well with the big boys, the likes of Microsoft (Hotmail) and AOL, it doesn’t stand a chance of being adopted in any useful sense.
And if email is left to continue it’s dissent into a cesspool of spam and Windows viruses? Well, it’ll still be to the likes Microsoft whom the world will come begging for an alternative.
If you want an rough idea what a replacement for email might look like, keep an eye on the IM networks over the next couple of years. On the one hand is what I would consider the ”traditional” approach to Internet services, favoured by Jabber, of decentralisation and open standards. On the other hand is the commercial approach of MSN, AOL, and Yahoo: proprietary protocols, user lock-in, software lock-in, and possible advertising or subscription revenue. As far as I know there’s no way to send messages between these commercial networks. Currently the best solution is a single application managing multiple separate accounts, but – when these networks begin to monetise – these temporary freedoms may prove short lived.
But maybe we won’t see this in email. Maybe the infrastructure won’t be built for the benefit of the big commercial players. Maybe a payment infrastructure would be built that, if it actually worked, would hardly ever be used.
I can’t see the world’s tax-men ignoring this for long.
While the frequent warnings about impending email taxes are usually variations on a long running hoax, it doesn’t mean that government bodies haven’t seriously considered it (especially in Europe). As recently as 1999 the UN proposed an email tax purely as a way of generating revenue (in this case for third world infrastructure development). I imagine it was mainly the lack of suitable infrastructure coupled with widespread suspicion of Government meddling in an emerging industry that eventually shelves these ideas.
Back in the mid-nineties the Canadian economist Arthur Cordell was proposing a “bit tax” of .000001 cents/bit. This might sound reasonable if you work out how much that is per email, but at the time I remember working out that (even if you were to discount the data used for routing and transmission control) the network delivery of a single MPEG-2 encoded 2-hour movie would accrue around $300 in tax. There’s clearly no direct correlation between bits and “value” – a single floppy disk’s worth of text can be more valuable than the bulk of Charlie Sheen’s filmography.
Emails are attractive as taxable electronic “items”. There’s still the potential for growth (especially in a spam-free environment), a fairly consistent idea of what a single email message is, and there’s usually some level of personal or commercial value in them that make sub-penny level taxes seem insignificant. And now, thanks to spam, tax proposals can now be dressed up as positive measures to benefit users.
When you introduce money into a system you’ll end up attempting to implement a solution that, as well as dealing with the primary problem of spam, also has to satisfy a host of conflicting secondary agendas. This is why I don’t think we’ll see currency based-charging in SMTP the resistance to change would be too great. And, I expect any proposed commercial replacement for SMTP/RFC-standard based email systems will incorporate charging from day one. And I don’t expect users to adopt them at anywhere near the penetration of current email.
But what of other “payment” schemes, ones that rely on non-currency based charging? Certainly, I think they’ve got more chance of adoption than money-based charges, but I’m not convinced yet. I’ll probably address these in a future submission.
