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

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hallam-Baker, Phillip 
> Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 5:56 PM
> To: Hannigan, Martin; ASRG
> Subject: RE: [Asrg] The pay-per message myth again
> 
> 
> > I'll have to differ on the opine and insinuation regarding SMS not
> > being the wave of the future. It's already here and it's 
> the absolute
> > rage in Europe and Asia. 
> 
> I would wager that if people were used to using free SMS that 
> they would not move to a charge per message model.

I agree. I'm just tossing some thoughts out. As I research this
more, I don't see why a limit on the flat rate wouldn't be helpful,
or doable.

[ snip ]


> > And Vodafone is a telco. Their experience billing voice minutes, 
> > and their reliance on the revenue as a public company, will help
> > them resolve that issue, but it will *never* be gone. Fraud will
> > account for 3 to 8% of all their revenue across all product lines,
> > including SMS. But this is good. Telco's prosecute fraud under 
> > theft statutes which are more cut and dry than any electronic spam
> > statute I've seen is.
> 
> As is repeated every time this one is brought up, the billing 
> infrastructure that supports the telcos represents tens of 
> billions of dollars worth of sunk capital investment and 
> costs several billion dollars a year to maintain.
> 
> Schemes that rely on the magical appearance of a billing 
> infrastructure that costs almost nothing to use might as well 
> depend on the invention of a perpetual motion machine. There 
> is no such infrastructure and several companies have gone 
> bankrupt trying to build one.
> 
> 
> The idea of making it uneconomic for spammers to spam is a 
> good one. It is not necessary to make legit users pay in 
> order to charge the spammers however. Bonded sender proves 
> that. Transfer of economic value is much more expensive than 
> if the parties prove that they have destroyed the equivalent 
> amount of goods if the amounts are less than a cent.
> 
> 
> The reason this keeps returning is ideological not technical. 
> Some folk think that the answer to every complex problem is 
> to recite Chairman Mao, others recite Ayn Rand, some climb 
> trees and blame everything on the Starbucks corporation and 
> there is no point in bothering to try to distinguish between them. 
> 
> Until you have a mechanism that can support the necessary 
> payments settlements you don't have a scheme. 

Why wouldn't existing telco interconnect settlement peering
cover this? One thought is that they don't break out by protocol
in the settlements, they break it out by bits and routes.

-M<


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