Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes:
In more general terms: A "free market" fundamentally grants more control to those with more money. Postage of whatever variety turns the medium over to those with more money. That would, in my opinion, fundamentally alter the character of email in a strongly negative direction.
More to the point, if you're charging prices that don't reflect the true costs of the activities, it'll catch up with you after a while; either the Tacky People will find a way to siphon money out of the system by some variant on spamming, or it won't have the same community you're looking for, because it's only used by people willing to pay extra for the service, or because the information flow that used to be provided free gets stifled, or somebody will offer a competing system that offers similar features at a lower cost, or whatever. Somehow Usenet has survived growing from a system small enough to read all the mail to a system with gigabytes of traffic per day, and it's still possible to find some signal among the noise (though the Web has siphoned off much of that signal.) And we've grown from tens of thousands of students and defense contractors on the Arpanet and UUCP and Fido nets and BBSs to tens of millions of users on the Internet. Filtering tools help find the interesting parts of the global discussion, and make it easier to get rid of the uninteresting parts. The present situation is that the social dynamics and economics are such that Tacky People can make money by being rude to everyone without being interesting in return. While trying to charge money for communications may work, I'm inclined to doubt it; the more interesting currency to try to model is Reputation, which leads to more like an Ender's Game kind of net, or to semi-closed communities like the Well (is?was?). # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)