David Course, Executive Editor of ZDNET’s Anchor Desk is another advocate of a pay per e-mail charge to reduce spam. Since spam persists because much of the costs of spam is shared by recipients, Course writes,
I’ve thought about this a great deal and the best solution I see is one you aren’t going to like: require e-postage for e-mail. That is, charge people on a per-message basis for the e-mail they send.
This should not be a charge large enough to give people pause, maybe a penny or even a fraction of a cent…just enough to keep people from pushing the button and sending a million “Herbal Viagra” e-mails at a whack. Make the charge high enough and all junk mail and lots of personal/business mail (like all those cc:’s you get in the office) would also go away.
The problem with this proposal is that it doesn’t appear to be serious. Would this really deter businesses from sending 1 million copies of an “Herbal Viagra” e-mail? Considering that 1 million e-mails would only cost $10,000 under this proposal, I doubt it ($10,000 is as good as free to reach 1 million people).
You would need to have a much higher tax to really discourage spamming, but the higher the tax, the more you would also discourage other traffic.
In fact it is hardly surprising that the people who would really benefit from such a system are Course’s employers ZDNET. Course notes that a penny an e-mail tax would cost ZDNET about $75,000/week. That’s a cost that ZDNET might be able to absorb, but it would bring other businesses and web sites to their knees.
Anything that raises the cost of operating on the web simply privileges existing, larger businesses over smaller, newer ones.