The notion that anyone who knows my phone number is authorized to call me any time of the day or night is stupid on a stick. So is the notion anyone who feels like it can clutter up my inbox.
I couldn't disagree more. The reason e-mail survives and none of the things that are supposed to be better and replace it have done so is exactly because anyone can send e-mail to anyone else. Phone calls have a much longer and more complicated history but universal service, the principle that every phone can connect to every other phone has always been a big deal. Until 1945 Philadelphia had two competing phone companies, every business needed to have two telephones wherever they had one, and it was a pain in the neck with preckous little benefit, at least in an era when the rates were all regulated anyway.
If you want a walled garden, there's no shortage of them but I have two observations. One is that they replace the spam problem with the introduction problem which is no easier, and the other is that any walled garden large enough to be interesting will also be large enough to include people you don't want to hear from.
The notion that anyone with scant technical knowledge can impersonate anyone else via telephone or email is more stupid on a bigger stick.
It's *always* been possible to lie about who you are when making a phone call, but for the first century or so nobody cared. Whhat changed?
I think the issue is what I would call friction. Whenever you have a service that lets people send unlimited numbers of messages for free, you will get spam. This is not a new observation; a short lived flat rate telegraph service in the late 1800s failed because it was full of spam. Making a phone call used to involve enough effort and expense that bulk junk calls didn't exist. (There were boiler rooms, but when each call needed a live person, the scals was limited.) We managed to mostly avoid e-mail spam because the Internet was a walled garden with social pressure against it, and the commercial services all charged. As soon as random people could easily get on the net in the early 1990s, we had usenet spam and then e-mail spam.
The trick is to add enough friction to messaging to make it unattractive to spam but not cripple it as a service. I can currently think of somewhat effective voice message friction ("press N to complete your call") but we've completely failed to come up with effective email friction, and e-postage ain't it.
R's, John
