Comment Re:Spam is an economic problem! (Score 1) 298
I would agree with Eric that spam is an economic problem. The spammer, like any freeloader, criminal or otherwise, has found ways to *shift* his costs onto others, and is essentially getting something for nothing.
Spam is incredibly cheap to send. Fighting it is expensive, and supporting the huge explosions in infrastructure is also expensive, but the spammer doesn't see the costs. Honest users pay, adding some small percent to their Internet bill to pay for spam filters, extra sysadmins, more storage for the Junk folders, etc.
Now, I disagree that charging everyone for email is the answer. There are other ways to force the spammer to pay his own way. For one thing, if we had all the technology we need to correctly bill people for the email they send, we would already have the accountability tools in hand -- and we could easily block mails that don't track back to a real sender from the system. We wouldn't actually need micropayments; if we just had the technology to track every email back to a real person, we'd already be done.
One way to tip the economic scales back to being even would be to rate-limit accounts -- for example, deny access to email after 1000 messages have been sent in one day. That's more than enough for most users but low enough to cause spammers some grief. However, the zombie armies keep growing too, thanks to viruses, and soon spammers will be able to find 10,000 machines to send 100 emails each. *sigh*.
Spam is incredibly cheap to send. Fighting it is expensive, and supporting the huge explosions in infrastructure is also expensive, but the spammer doesn't see the costs. Honest users pay, adding some small percent to their Internet bill to pay for spam filters, extra sysadmins, more storage for the Junk folders, etc.
Now, I disagree that charging everyone for email is the answer. There are other ways to force the spammer to pay his own way. For one thing, if we had all the technology we need to correctly bill people for the email they send, we would already have the accountability tools in hand -- and we could easily block mails that don't track back to a real sender from the system. We wouldn't actually need micropayments; if we just had the technology to track every email back to a real person, we'd already be done.
One way to tip the economic scales back to being even would be to rate-limit accounts -- for example, deny access to email after 1000 messages have been sent in one day. That's more than enough for most users but low enough to cause spammers some grief. However, the zombie armies keep growing too, thanks to viruses, and soon spammers will be able to find 10,000 machines to send 100 emails each. *sigh*.
