Making Spammers Pay - Is It Workable?
from the this-again? dept
Proposals to add some sort of charge to every email have come up in the past, and are usually quickly shouted down as unfeasible or unworkable. However, as spam becomes worse and worse a problem, people are beginning to revisit these ideas. Declan McCullough is pointing out that spam is really a pollution problem. That is, it's a negative externality. As you'll recall from your economics classes, negative externalities are what happens when the bad results are not priced back to those producing them, passing the costs onto society. These are considered market failures, since the incentives don't work properly. Generally, the way to deal with negative externalities like pollution is to have the government come in and place charges on them - thus putting the cost back on the entity creating the pollution. McCullough talks through a few ideas for how spammers could be charged - one of which would involve paying by processor time instead of money. The Financial Times ran a similar article last week with its own proposal for charging for spam. In the past, I've been against this idea, but I'm starting to reconsider my opinion. If the system could be designed well (a big if) - it might make sense. The trick is setting it up in a way that really doesn't bother regular users at all, but is a pain for spammers. Of course, knowing how spammers work, I'm sure they'd just figure out a way to masquerade themselves as regular users - or move further into using trojan horse programs to make innocent victims pay for their spam instead.