In the immortal words of John R. Levine (johnl@iecc.com):
* It swaps the current set of problems for an all-new and quite possibly worse set of problems, as bad guys come up with ways to scam the per-message payment system. Just think, get infected with e-payment klez via your fast always-on DSL connection, come back the next day and find that it's sent 50,000 messages so it's spent $1,000 of your money. If you waive fees for virus victims, every spammer's going to claim a virus did it. And maybe a virus really did do it, it's the obvious way to send spam with someone else's stamps.
I'm not sure that would be a bad thing in the long run. You know what _I_ would do if I were a smart lawyer and heard about a bunch of people that this had happened to? I'd file a class-action liability suit against Microsoft for selling a defective product that lost my clients thousands of dollars. I suspect I'd have a good chance of winning, too.
* It turns every ISP into a bank.
Mmmmm...not necessarily. It certainly creates a market for companies to provide outsourcing of e-postage metering and collection for ISPs, and as such it would add to ISPs' overhead costs. Would it add more than the overhead cost of dealing with current spam loads? Maybe. Would it add more than the overhead cost of dealing with a 90% spam load, which we _will_ see in the next 5 years? I doubt it.
ISPs don't have the expertise to be banks, nor can they afford the financial exposure. What are you going to do when 10 of your users get e-klez, refuse to pay the postage that the virus stole, and leave you holding a $10K bag?
Sue Microsoft for $10k plus time, aggravation and punitive damages. :)
* Nobody in the world has the faintest idea how you could implement 2 cent payments fast and cheap enough to use to pay for e-mail.
Here, unfortunatly, is the real problem. Everybody has been saying that micropayments are a great idea for 4+ years now, but nobody has a working implementation that could possibly come close to scaling to "everyone who uses SMTP, all the time."
PS: Anti-spam laws aren't going to solve everything, but the TCPA made a whole lot more difference to the junk fax problem than any set of phone line filters.
Agreed. -n ------------------------------------------------------------<memory@blank.org> "Thus do `Snuff Movies' take their place with `Political-Correctness,' `Sex Addiction,' and `Postmodernism' as Godzillas of bogus moral panic, always threatening to crush the nation in their jaws, but never quite willing to take the final step of biting down. (--www.suck.com) <http://blank.org/memory/>----------------------------------------------------