Re: Recipients get the postage

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 12:05 AM 6/19/96, Hal wrote:

>I was reading old threads on remailers, where various ideas were
>suggested to reduce abuse.  One was to charge postage, in order to
>discourage spam and somewhat discourage nastygrams, as well as to
>compensate the remailer operator for his risks.  A variant was to tell
>the recipient that he had anonymous mail waiting, and possibly charge him
>to receive it.
>
>I had a different idea, which has probably been suggested before: make
>the sender of the anonymous mail pay, but pass the money to the
>recipient.

An interesting variant; I would certainly like to see _any_ of the various
digital postage ideas tried. Alas, none have (save for Sameer's option for
charging for remailings).

However, I can see some problems which I think would arise with Hal's
"recipient gets postage" scheme.

* in an ecology of several types of remailers, some not charging postage,
some charging postage (with subcategories of some giving the postage to the
recipient and some keeping the postage for themselves), who would use the
postage variant?

(This is a recurring situation where some services are free and some are
not. I fully realize that some paid services prosper (duh!, as we still
have thriving economies) even where free alternatives exist. That the
various newspapers continue to sell, or that premium t.v. channels on cable
thrive, when "free" alternatives exist is just one example. How paid
remailers would compete with free remailers is a topic we've written much
about.)

* the "cost" of remailing is not borne by the recipient, in the current
situation, so why should a "remailer gets postage" system have advantages?

* a recipient may "demand" payment for remailed messages, e.g., by adopting
a policy of saying "Unless I find 37 digicents per 10KB of size, I will
dump the message...so if you want to reach me, pay me." This "works" by the
simple expedient of being a demand that is adhered to. (In this case, the
recipient of a message is "selling" a commodity: access to him. The senders
of messages can either accept his terms or reject them.)

[Note: Current e-mail systems are not very market-based. Metering is almost
nonexistent, and it's as if anyone could mail a ton or two of horse manure
to anyone for no cost. I expect this to eventually change, and one way it
could change is for mail clients to refuse to accept delivery unless
certain conditions were met (who the sender is, how much payment is
attached, etc.). The ontology of physical package and mail delivery systems
has some lessons, though not all translate easily into the Internet
domain.]

* but it seems to make little sense for a remailer, absent such a demanded
price, to give up his postage fee to a recipient!

I'm not saying such a system could not work, only that I would not expect a
free market ecology of remailers to evolve this as a stable evolutionary
strategy.

I would expect a more likely future stable strategy to include some
combination of payments demanded by remailers and some payment or the like
demanded by terminal recipients.


>All my complaints come from people who have received mail, never from
>people who have sent it.  So obviously the steps we take need to make
>recipients happier.  Paying them is one way to do it.

Not to be flippant, but the job of making recipients happier is probably
not ours. We don't know whether a digital dime will make them happier for
receiving a threat, or a flame, or a 10 MB coredump file. This is why it is
up to the recipient to set policies, prices, etc.

(Ditto for the remailers, as only they know how much it is worth to them to
remail a given message, depending on packet size, perceived risk to them,
etc.)

Again, I always enjoy gedankenexperiments about digital postage. But I am
chagrinned that nearly four years after the first remailers we are still
operating in thought experiment mode for the most part.

I believe this is because there really is very little market at this time
for anonymous remailings. Those who mostly use remailers appear to be
willing to use casual-grade remailers, with few of the real Chaumian
protections. And they are not very concerned about reliablity, cover
traffic, etc.

Digital postage would be a bothersome wrinkle and would be routed-around by
most.

Ergo, no commercial-grade remailers, no insistence on robustness and
reliability, no digital postage, and no interest by Microsoft!

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
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