Are you ready to pay for e-mail?
By Charles Cooper
CNET News.com
February 5, 2004, 12:16 PM PT

Sometimes, all it takes is someone to speak the unspeakable to force a break with conventional wisdom.

So it was that Bill Gates triggered a firestorm of protest by suggesting that the best way to stem the growth of spam would be to require people to pay money to send e-mail.

Gates--by virtue of his celebrity status--elevated the question to the front pages when he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that a fee-based system could eliminate the spam epidemic within the next couple of years.

The idea of charging to send Internet messages actually has been talked about for quite some time.
That drew a predictable thumbs-down from critics, who said the idea was simply impractical, if not downright antithetical to the libertarian ethos that helped shape the Internet. Well, as a former U.S. President was wont to say, Let me say this about that.

To be sure, Gates' comments constituted downright heresy. This is the Internet, after all, not Interstate 80, going west. But is the proposal so off-the-wall that it should be dismissed outright?

The idea of charging to send Internet messages has actually been talked about for quite some time. The basic idea being that the current system makes it too easy to spam and that freight charges would deter the scammers who depend on receiving a handful of responses to their mass spam blitzes.

This isn't the only idea under consideration. The Internet Research Task Force is working to come up with a sender notification system that better distinguishes between the senders of legitimate e-mail and spammers. The system would let Web domain owners control how their e-mail suffixes get used. In this way, recipients could determine whether someone was faking their return address. Elsewhere, various filtering and legislation have also been put forward in the last several months.

Pretty cool idea. But as promising as it sounds, sender notification ......................................
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