Ed. note -- It's an idea with great surface appeal, but the arbitrage opportunities would be potentially immense, and the abuse and micro-transactions tracking and accounting requirements huge. Would the "stamp" be based on, as now, some "weight" (or message length) combined with the "distance" traveled? If so, who would set these amounts, and how would they operate in a global fashion where distance has essentially no meaning? How would counterfeiting be prevented? How would price increases be decided and implemented? Would refunds be available for "undeliverable" mail? Who would be responsible for maintaing postal "forwarding" a la the current USPS 1-year forwarding scheme, etc. etc.? This proposals strikes me as presenting potentially insurmountable problems, coupled with an even larger chicken-and-egg situation that could make the cure worse than the disease.
Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail
Paying for e-mail seen as anti-spam tactic
NEW YORK (AP) --If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying "stamps" for e-mail.
Many Internet analysts worry, though, that turning e-mail into an economic commodity would undermine its value in democratizing communication. But let's start with the math: At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn't significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day. Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time.
Though postage proposals have been in limited discussion for years -- a team at Microsoft Research has been at it since 2001 -- Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Details came last week as part of Microsoft's anti-spam strategy. Instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender's good faith."
Retrieve entire article at http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/05/spam.charge.ap/index.html.