What if Google decided to make a Gmail account cost $1 a year instead of giving it away for free? And what if you had to use a valid credit card to pay for it?
And further, what if your Google e-mail address had to include your real name?
And what if a violation of Google’s anti-spam rules (I’m assuming they’d have some) would cost $20 per incident?
Suddenly Google would become the gold standard. People would happily let it through the spam filters. You could trust it. People would become suspicious of anyone who used any other online e-mail service.
That is from Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big. Being a naive economist, I would sooner conclude that spam isn’t so big a problem any more. It is at least a smaller problem than the costs of forcing everyone to use a single credit card-based email service. Of course we can imagine less monopolistic versions of this idea but we return to the notion that the open-access provision of the Internet seems more valuable than avoiding spam.
Gmail’s spam filters are very good. Only one or two pieces of spam per month make it through to my inbox.
This means that other services either have something comparible now, or will have something comparible soon, or Gmail will drive them out of business.
Since Gmail is a free service, the marginal cost of blocking spam must be approaching zero.
Conclusion: Email spam is no longer a serious problem.
To the extent there is a problem, the market has already solved it by providing people with whatever level of protection they want to pay for. A free service brings little (but surprisingly good) protection. Those who want more protection can pay for it.
Also, FWIW, my various yahoo email addresses have garnered almost no spam over the past year or so.
fishbane, a very small part of the world bandwith is used by email so your numbers are misleading.
Also if property rights were properly enforced, the SPAM bill would go to Microsoft and its defective proprietary software (most of the world SPAM is sent by DSL machines running infected proprietary software).
And Microsoft rise is due to government intervention in the free market in the form of intellectual property monopolies…
Eli, you are detracting from the pleasure and usefulness of this
blog, to say nothing of your own credibility, with your name calling.
Please refrain.
I’m also going to question whether gmail accounts are used for spam reponse reception.
You’ve also got the problem of intentional spoofing of gmail accounts to burn a paying member. Spam wouldn’t go out from the gmail servers (spammers use a variety methods to send out emails, including open mail servers, bot nets, sometimes even their own servers.) So, if a malicious person knew a persons gmail account name, which in your scenario would be based on their real name, they could send out a bunch of spam “originating” from that gmail users. Yadda, yadda, yadda, suddenly a legitimate gmail user sees a $10,000 bill on their credit card.
The problem with anti-spam measure, such as the “calculate the integer” option above, is you are then opening the mail server to new and exciting denial-of-service attack.
Really, the only cure for spam is to change recipients behaviour. The spammer (or phisher) only needs 1 person out of every 10,000 to respond to the email to make mass emailings worthwhile. How to do that is an excercise left to better social engineers than myself.
My gmail account is dying of spam, and Gmail’s spam filter is blocking my own messages to myself. It’s a disaster, and Gmail’s role at the hub of Google’s digital identity strategy means the collapse of Gmail threatens the entire suite of Google services I rely on.
More here:
http://jfaughnan.blogspot.com/2006/09/be-evil-gmail-spam-data-lock-and.html
The problem’s a little more complicated the Mr. Godin imagines. Essntially no spam actually orginates from Gmail now. (I’m quite sure that if I use Gmail to attempt to mail a really great offer to 5000 of my nearest and dearest friends, Gmail wouldn’t let it go through.) So why is a fee and credit card needed?
On a lighter note, here’s the checklist that explains why your spam-fighting solution won’t work.
That plan will simply cost riot! They couldn’t simply cut down this free gmail accounts now that it giving us the pleasure.
I don’t quite understand the difficulty of a “hash-cash” implementation just taking off immediately. The only coordination problem is getting someone to write a sorting plugin. If sender provides the cash, the message is instantly elevated. Standardize the number of bits required at the mailserver or societally:
“In other news, the cost of email has increased by one hash-bit. The EPostal Service says it has been forced to raise the price in response to lower volume, targeted junk mail and faster computers”.
Server-lists can be whiteballed personally.
Don’t bayesian spam filters basically solve the spam problem? I think I’ve gotten less than one spam per month since installing SpamBayes for outlook, and every single spam that’s gotten through has been tagged as suspected spam. I’m sure something similar is avaiable for every major email client.
The factoring plan doesn’t really work because it fails to take account for “Open relays in foreign countries” and “Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes” from the list linked above.
Godin’s plan doesn’t work, because not everyone wants to use Google. What if you don’t want them to store all of your email? What if your account got suspended because you wanted to advertise your gun store and Google doesn’t let you do that?
Contrary to popular belief, the people waging the anti-spam war are not idiots, or even particularly unimaginative. E-mail is useful because it’s very cheap and easy to send, enough people will order herbal penis enlargement pills from spam to make it worthwhile to send, and Microsoft will not voluntarily give up its domination of the corporate productivity software market.
There is still a lot of ignorance about how spam works and how the internet works here. The entire point of the internet is to allow easy connectivity for everyone — people with old systems, people in foreign countries, people at major companies, and people on homebrew systems in their garage. Once you create a system for trusted/paying customers only and exclude everyone else, you aren’t on the Internet anymore. You’re on the Excludernet, and your Excludernet will lack the Internet’s combination of economies of scale and low barriers to entry, as well as alienating your friends and customers. No one with any business sense would switch over.
What’s really annoying about Godin’s proposal is that of all major companies, Google benefits the most from the Internet’s current culture of openness, and they have the most to lose from a switch to closed/trusted systems. Anyone who suggests “Google should do this” is engaging in pure fantasy. Verizon might do this, AOL might try this, and Microsoft might think about it. But Google would be more likely to announce that they’re giving up on computers and switching to publishing a big yellow book of directory listings once a year.
In another post, Tyler mentions that it sometimes helps to convexify your choice set by adding intermediate choices. This is a case where that doesn’t apply. The two solutions of “open, risky Internet” and “stick to snail mail” dominate all the choices in between. Your cost to send mail is always going to be either 0 or 39-cents + postal commission approved increases.
First – Factorization won’t make hordes of bots go away, but it will reduce the damage they can do (fewer spams/bot/day) and it will make life much more difficult for their owners (from “not so snappy” to “unable to even play solitare”).
Second – Many ISPs would likely choose to “trust” automated emails from eBay and Amazon without requiring factorization anywhere along the line. Of course, they wouldn’t have to, which is precisely the point: that a receipient can name a “price” to accept an email and a sender can choose whether or not to “pay” it.
Third – The problem of legitimate mass mailings was already addressed earlier. Subscribers can white-list the senders of mailing lists to which they wish to subscribe. In effect, this forces mailing lists to become “opt-in”, which is a good thing.
Seth’s use of Google is a distraction. His argument works better if you say “someone” instead of “Google.” The idea is that if someone offered email service that cost a nominal fee and that could collect penalties for sending spam, then no spammer would use it, and thus all email receivers would not block it, and thus everyone would start using it because it would never be blocked.
Left somewhat unstated is the implication that email receivers will at some point block email from all senders that are not implementing a cash-penalty-for-spam system like the one he proposes. More specifically, that enough email receivers will block all senders except “someone” such that all senders will switch to “someone” so that they can send email to the blocking receivers.
Which of the checkboxes from this checklist apply to Seth’s idea is left as an exercise for the reader.
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