On Message with Ben Gross

Moving to a system of “sender pays” has long been discussed as an approach to eliminating spam. Over the last few days, the topic has come up again, with both Yahoo and AOL announcing plans to work with Goodmail, which is offering a sender-pays service.

The argument for sender-pays goes something like “filters can always be circumvented, spam will never be eradicated until it is made unprofitable, and the best way to do this is to charge for postage.”

The reality is more problematic, in part because the underlying metaphors are broken. Is it that postage is needed to improve delivery, or have AOL and Yahoo just announced that their spam cops expect bribes?

The idea that carriers of email should charge a premium to others to deliver information goes against the Internet’s culture, which is based on peering (you carry my traffic, I’ll carry yours), not settlements (I’ll charge you to talk to my customers, and pay to talk to yours). While peering is generally applied to packets rather than email messages, the principle is the same, and it goes against sender pays.

If Goodmail, AOL, and Yahoo decide to split the income with their subscribers, that could make it much more interesting. Unfortunately, the new offering doesn’t do much for end users beyond making a promise to reduce spam, and in the case of AOL, to display ads that otherwise would appear as links. In sum, this looks more like a scheme to transfer money to a few large companies from lots of smaller ones, rather than a creation of new value.

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