On Wed, 28 May 2003, S Woodside wrote: > On Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 02:01 PM, David Morris wrote: > > > Junk email on the other hand has an extremely low cost of transmission > > in > > the current economic model. > > There is a difference between the people selling the product, and the > people sending the spam. Usually not the same people. The SELLERS do > have a transmission cost as they must pay the spammers to spam people > for them. Admittedly not much, but the sellers are a much easier target > than the spammers. Drive their costs up significantly and you dry up > the spam market by implication (for types 1 and 2, which at least for > me are the bulk of my 50 or so spams a day). In one sense, you are agreeing with my basic premis .. the economic model most change. Where we may disagree is whether any particular proposal will make a significant change is costs. A cursory look at some small portion of my spam suggests that the SELLERS have a very small physical footprint in a very high percentage of the cases. Easy to morph into another entity. Roughly $500 to incorporate in the US which at the minimum provides a additional layer to the onion which must be removed to get at the real people involved. If they move the whole operation to some carribean island nation, it is no big deal to ship many of the products I'm offered these days. For example, one homeopathic medical (oximoron I know) supply company uses third party agents to take orders. The base company, which has been in business for years, ships the product directly to the consumer. I doubt that such a company would be found guilty of spamming if one of these agents chose to use spam to generate business. There are also international communications treaties, first amendment rights, etc. which I suspect would preclude out and out blocking of internet traffic from our infamous carribean neighbor. Hence my conclusion that the only realistic way to alter the economics is to collect the fee up front using a combination of protocols, social and legal provisions designed to avoid or absolutely minimize the free exchange of email/information between related parties. Such fees could also support the new PKI, server, etc. infrastructure needed to introduce other aspects of any possible technical solutions. Dave Morris