On Tue, Aug 05, 1997 at 10:28:02AM -0700, stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:
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;
I am, of course, familiar with this line of reasoning :-). However, it is arguably the case that the true cost of email *is* being paid. The real problem is that email is unbelievably cheap, for both recipient and sender -- a sender can send more mail than anyone can read at a very low cost, and a recipient can easily receive more mail than they can possibly read, again for a very low cost. [...]
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?).
Yes, virtual cryptographically closed communities. A concept whose time has come, perhaps. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html