Are you ready to pay for e-mail?

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No, just utterly impractical

It is practically impossible to effectively charge for e-mail. Everyone pays for e-mail now through their ISP charges on what is essentially a community rating scheme - you pay a share of the overall cost of providing the service in a single periodic payment.

Why is it practically impossible? Just a few high-level thoughts on the difficulties:

1. The entire world's email systems are built on free email. They assume messages cost zero, so there is zero infrastructure to deal with unpaid email, nor are there any business rules about what to do about it. In some countries, if the Post Office gets an un-stamped letter, they deliver it and then charge the recipient, other countries simply trash the mail, others will return it to the sender and ask for a fee. Which model will e-mail use?

2. Who will police the system? International telephony is controlled by numerous inter-government deals and payments, imagine the complexity of having to arrange for similar deals for e-mail payments, particularly when e-mail is already ubiquitous and free. Why would any nation want to sign up?

3. Who will collect and distribute the money? If individual ISPs are given the power, who will ensure they actually collect? If government (or some government body) is given the power, how will they force ISPs to regulate the sending of e-mail and payment of fees?

4. How do you define an e-mail? How many systems use SMTP or POP simply to send messages from one system to another? There are mobile messaging systems that use these protocols for sending messages, are you going to charge a company to send messages to itself? Is e-mail defined by the protocol, the purpose or the content? Which one will you use?

5. At what point do you levy the fee? If it's intra-company e-mail that never leaves a site, do you charge? How about intra-company messages across a public network? Then inter-company? What if I collect my company email at the server, encrypt it then send it via FTP, decode it at the other end and deliver it via an internal system - should I pay? After all, my usage of the public network was FTP, not SMTP or POP. If someone creates a new protocol for sending messages (there are already thousands, but let's assume yet another "standard"), how do you determine whether it's email and should be subject to fees, or it's just a messaging protocol and should remain free?

If e-mail had been designed from the outset as a "for fee" service, I sure this would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately for Bill, e-mail was not designed to be a for-fee service. It has been developed and extended world wide for 35 years as a free service, the entire infrastructure assumes it is free. To levy fees now is simply impossible.

Posted by: Fred Fredrickson   Posted on: 02/05/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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