Re: [Asrg] The pay-per message myth again

["Hannigan, Martin" <hannigan at verisign.com>]

Not to be facecious, but when does the research start or did I not read the
faq? 

I came to wirte an rfc, a bcp, develop a plan to put forth to the inet
communtiy, or help someone else. I've already heard all the for and against
arguments from a to z. Its clear that everyone understands "the problem" and
are formidable opponents to spam.

Now what?


Cheers,

-M
---
Martin Hannigan
hannigan at verisign.com
Verisign, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: asrg-bounces at ietf.org <asrg-bounces at ietf.org>
To: ASRG <asrg at ietf.org>
CC: John Levine <asrg at johnlevine.com>
Sent: Mon Dec 27 09:16:59 2004
Subject: Re: [Asrg] The pay-per message myth again

>>>Ten years ago there were lots of e-mail services that charged by the
>>>message.  Now they're all dead.  This is a big hint.
>
>
>>Of course, nothing has changed in the last 10 years. Nothing ever does,
>>right? And besides, there have been a lot of businesses that did the
>other
>>thing, and have gone also. I just love these "common-sense" arguments.
>
>I'm sorry, but other than that you're trying to be snide, I don't
>understand what point you're trying to make.
>

No, I'm pointing out a clearly fallacious argument. This is not to say that
your conclusions are wrong of course, but to say that pay-to-send can't
work in the future because it didn't work in the past is to say nothing
useful.


>Of course things have changed in 10 years.  In 1994 there was no giant
>unmetered e-mail infrastructure, and there were people willing to pay
>per message for e-mail.  Today SMTP exists everywhere, and as I noted
>the pay per message services are gone.
>
>It's blindingly obvious that a system that really did charge all
>senders even a little bit per message wouldn't have a spam problem, so
>why don't we have pay per message email?
>
>The only ppm service of which I'm aware these days is SMS, the text
>message add-on to cell service.  PPM charges mirrors cell service
>charges.  In North America, where mobile users pay for both incoming
>and outgoing calls, PPM is charged per message in both directions.
>Carriers all offer message bundles similar to minute bundles that are
>a lot cheaper than individual messages.  Elsewhere in the world where
>mobile service is all caller-pays, sending SMS costs money, receiving
>SMS is free.  Is SMS the wave of the future?  I doubt it.
>

It's interesting that you mention SMS, in the European market, 160 billion
messages are exchanged per month
[ http://www.gsmworld.com/documents/netsize_guide2004_mda.pdf ](I haven't
got a good figure for email to hand - probably rather more, but how many
are spam :-) ). So it seems foolish to speculate about SMS *in the future*
- while the US 'cellphone' biz is weak by comparison, in most of the
'developed' world SMS *is* the asynchronous messaging channel of choice for
for some big (and important) user-groups.

>For one thing, the assumption that you can get people to pay for all
>of the messages is wildly optimistic.  I was talking to a security
>manager at Vodaphone earlier this year, and he told me that they have
>a moderate number of gateways through which messages SMS can be sent
>into their SMS system, and they have constatnt problems with spam
>gushing in through them due to some combination of configuration
>errors and hacks.  Maybe they can fix it, but as I've noted before if
>email costs real money, there will be constant attacks to either avoid
>paying or (the zombie problem) to charge the messages to someone else.
>

I've seen a lot of *very* poorly secured web/SMS gateways and I'm sure that
there exist all sorts of other ways that spam gets into the system that
could (and should) be closed.


>Also, people who do serious messaging on their cell phones don't pay
>per message now.  If you use something like a Blackberry, you don't
>pay per message, you use GPRS and pay for bandwidth, or more typically
>a (rather high) flat rate, just like everyone else who uses e-mail.
>

I think you'll find that a lot of email is sent using somebody else's
bandwidth. Apart from that, I'm not sure what "serious messaging" is:
is 100 users each sending 1MB messages more 'serious' than 100K users
sending 10 of 100 character messages per day?


>So what am I missing?  Unless you believe that spam will get so awful
>that people will turn off SMTP mail, it's hard to see how you're going
>to get an interesting number of users to move to something that costs
>more and can only exchange messages with other people on the same
>system.
>

No, rather, spam gets so bad that people are prepared to incur costs
reducing the pain. I don't know (any more than you, perhaps) what that
means. Do they move to other channels? Closed systems? Spend on hardware
and bandwith so that their PCs can cope?

Presumably the market will respond to the problem in a way that tends to
maximise the utility of the system for the largest number of participants?
Oh no, wait, I meant to say: "maximise profits for those with the most
control over the current system".






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