Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 14:18:10 -0500
From: Jamie Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Steve Schear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
Mail-Followup-To: Steve Schear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Organization: clue inc
X-URL: http://www.clueinc.net/
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.3i
On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Steve Schear wrote:
> I guess you have unlimited time and consider your time worthless. Its not
That doesn't follow at all. I consider my limited time very valuble.
I simply believe creating an artificial scarcity at the infrastructure level a bad way to address spam.
What part of the infrastructure is being made scarce? You and I aren't part of the infrastructure. The selection of a value for our time is just another market force at work.
I agree with Jamie's point, in that nearly _anytime_ some authority decides on pricing, this generated artificial scarcities.
Examples abound: government places "luxury tax" on yachts or "gas guzzler taxes" on vehicles. The result is that artificial scarcities are created, and loopholes (such as grandfathered yachts or vehicles, or already-owned yachts or vehicles, become more valuable).
Government taxes one channel of communication, and thus makes other channels more profitable.
"Nailing jelly to a tree." Aka "the law of unintended consequences."
The general name is "market distortions." Nearly all efforts to set prices produce market distortions and require the threat of force to enforce. (An example is the oft-cited postage stamp: the U.S.P.S. needs to have laws banning competition in letter delivery, else they'll be run out of business.)
As I understand your proposal, Steve, you propose some authority setting some price to send something.
Hey, if Alice wants to send something over my network, who are you or the government to tell me she must pay me, or I must pay the next link in the chain, etc.?
But its not cash for email transport. The transport cost is unaffected. Its cash for our eyeballs. I find this a distinction WITH a difference. Perhaps you do not.
If Alice wishes to post a sign saying "Pay me 25 cents or I won't see your message," this is her right, and her responsibility to figure out how to deploy technologically and sell to enough of her correspondents.
Not a job for ISPs to do, except that they are also "Alices" and could presumably issue the same demand.
In other words, there are many stages in the network, from ISPs to phone lines to fiber optics to customers, and so on, and none of them have any special status, only the ability to make contracts.
So if a network hop, e.g., "Tim's Hundred Kilometers," wishes to charge for traffic on the line he owns, so be it. Ditto for "Steve's ISP." Ditto for "Alices Eyeballs."
To be sure, an accounting mess. But no different from the fact that a head of lettuce goes from farmer to truck to refrigerated rail car to truck to distribution point to supermarket to buyer with dozens or even several dozens of money transfers along the way.
(Prices propagate in various ways, just as they did in neolithic times, just as they did along the Silk Road, just as they did a century ago.)
It is not the job of any agency of men with guns to set prices at some particular point in this process.
The fact that we don't yet know what, if any, market solution for unwanted e-mail will be is not grounds for jumping in with a market-distorting, statist solution.
--Tim May
