Future Tense interview transcript, Feb. 6, 2004
Sonia Arrison is director of technology studies at the Pacific Research Institute.
ARRISON: One of the reasons why we get so much spam now is that the economics are all wrong. The spammers get to send for free, and the people who wind up paying it are the recipients and the ISPs. So if you shift the economics a bit, then I think it would drastically reduce the amount of junk e-mail that everyone is getting.
I wonder what other kinds of consequences it might have, though. We like this idea of the Internet as a kind of free place where we can communicate without hassle, and the idea of having to pay for e-mail is anathema to much of the Internet community.
ARRISON: I know, and whenever I explain this idea to people, their first reaction is to get very nervous. And so I tell them that there's ways to set the system up so that you can still have free communication between people who know each other and between friends and family.
How should a postage system work?
ARRISON: The way I would like to see it happen is, basically anyone you don't know has to pay to send you e-mail. Anyone you do know, you've got sort of like a little white list, and you put your friends and your family on it, and they get zero-dollar stamps attached to their e-mail through the system. So they still have a stamp on their mail, but it's a zero cost. So that way, you can filter based on whether the mail coming in has a stamp or not.
Purely out of self-interest here, as a journalist, I e-mail people I don't know all the time. I've got to pay for that?
ARRISON: You put it the other way. Usually a journalist says to me, I get lots of e-mail all the time, but I want to get all that e-mail, and so you don't want to make the charge too high for people to come into your e-mail box. But the thing I would like to see is for people to be able to set their own price for stamps. So say you are a journalist and you want to get lots of mail from people, you might set your price really low. Or you might set no price at all. That's the beauty of the system as I'd like to see it. Everybody would be able to set their own prices and it would be very flexible.
What do you think an e-mail should cost?
ARRISON: That's a good question. I think that one penny would be enough to stop the major spammers, to stop all the Viagra, Nigerian scams, that kind of stuff from coming into your inbox.
Because once you add up the million messages you might send in a day or a week, you're talking real money?
ARRISON: The economics aren't there. Spammers have to send out a lot of messages to make any money. So even with one penny a message, they'd be put out of business.
How tough do you think this idea will be to sell?
ARRISON: It all depends on how much we as a society really dislike spam. Everybody talks about it and everybody complains about it, but actions always speak louder than words, and if this is something that people really, really, dislike, here's a solution that will work.