I get a lot of spam in email (and texts, and phone calls, and …) I pay for the infrastructure that allows this to happen, by paying my ISP a monthly fee, my phone provider a fee, … Why do I pay for others to abuse my communication tools?

In the days of regular landlines, the party placing the call was billed, not the recipient. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get lots of calls from random causes.

Let’s charge a (micro) fee for each message transmitted, to be paid to the recipient’s mail (SMTP/IMAP) provider. For example, WhidbeyNet would receive a small net positive for each email they are sent, and the sender would be charged that amount. Over the course of a month, say, WhidbeyNet’s service cost would be more than covered by the income they get from all the spam that gets sent to my account, and they would then completely scrap their telecom charges to me.

When I send an email, I’d get charged (the same) microscopic amount (everyone who sends mail is charged) and the recipient’s SMTP/IMAP provider credited. At the end of the billing period, that’d be netted against the amount that WhidbeyNet received from people sending to me. Unless I sent copious numbers of messages, I’d end up paying nothing but my ISP would more than recover a reasonable profit over operations.

In fact, I suspect that three things might happen if there was a cost incurred to the sender, paid to the recipient’s provider:

• the ISP would become a bit of a gold mine. The incentive to set up an ISP and string infrastructure around the currently “money-losing” rural areas would be much stronger, and internet coverage would increase.
• Internet access would be effectively free for end-users; in effect they’re saying “paid for by people trying to send me spam”.
• Spam would decrease, because it would cost more to send (and be proportional to the volume of spam sent). So it would behoove advertisers to become more selective in deciding whose inbox to fill up.

This would need to be tied to a mail identity verification mechanism so the right party gets charged, of course, something we’ve all been talking about for a while. And it’s not a new idea; micropayments for mail and other transactions have been mooted for decades, some test systems implemented and their effectiveness and practicality debated. But: no one’s yet refuted the idea that costless comms lead to abuse. So let’s get the people who make money by abusing the system pay for the system, instead of the people who have to put up with the abuse.