Re: [Asrg] Re: Answering a lot of questions about e-postage in a few sentences

[John Levine <asrg at johnlevine.com>]

> > > But telephone in general, postal, sender pays.
> > 
> > This is because no other system outside of e-mail has the same
> > underlying cost structure that e-mail does.  The phone system perhaps
> > comes cloest - and, surprise surprise, that's the system where the
> > analogue of spam is most hated and most acted against.
>
>Electricity too cheap to meter!

Actually, telephony has become too cheap to meter.  Every local
service provider from Verizon to Vonage has an unmetered plan that
they're trying to get people to buy.

The possiblities of abuse are limited, since the number of phone calls
you can make is limited by the fact that you only have one mouth to
speak out of, and the most annoying kinds of phone overusage abuse,
telemarketing and junk faxes, are already heavily regulated or
illegal.

This tells me that it really is a poor analogy for e-mail, since one
of the things that makes spam possible is that you can send a whole
lot of mail from a modest IP connection.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com


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