The Difficulty of Source Level Blocking

[hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)]

>It's broken in the larger sense that Eric mentioned: costs are not
>incurred by posters. 
[...]
>Very long term, when message costs are borne by the sender, this
>problem goes away.

I really doubt the problem goes away.  Message costs have some
restrictive effect, but they are not a panacea.  (They are a panacea
for supporting remailer services, but that should be obvious.)
Transmission costs are dropping so fast that it is conceivable that
the cost of a broadcast of a three page message to everyone in the
world will be less than a dollar.

Mailbombing might be solved by message costs, and will be a deterrent,
but mailbombing is such a blunt weapon.

As I recently argued, the problem is not individual disrupters but
salience in general.

Usenet is broken because it transmits everything which is sent to it,
without any sort of judgement as to the propriety of the message to
the newsgroups to which it is posted.  Paying for the message does not
solve the problem of newbie questions, or flame wars (low bandwidth
data, high bandwidth emotion; flames are extremely compressible), or
digressions.

Eric