someone writes: $ an anon-http proxy server would probably consume much more in $ the way of network resources than a remailer, which will $ likely lead to many being shutdown once discovered by the sysadmins
That might be somewhat less true on a commercial provider than on an educational or corporate provider, but in any case a WWW anon-server would be seen as a much larger potential security hole than a remailer. A couple of months ago a "friendly" outsider gained unauthorized access to user files here via our Web server, and reported it to the sysadmins. I would have been mighty nervous if I'd been offering anon WWW access to the world.
I'd be happy to setup a machine at my providers site do run a test of anonymized httpd. From what I understand they wouldn't mind helping either. Within the next 6 months, there probably will be a number of for pay anonymizer services availible on the net. It just makes too much sense for it to not happen.