Re: Looking at the U in UBE

>E-Mail is free and should always be free.  Any system that is not will never 
>succeed.

More to the point, any such system ceases to be "email" in the proper
sense of the word.

After all, any pay-based system for email is going to run into the
rather serious problem that the Internet that underlies any such
technology is, itself, prone to the exact same problems that email
faces.  email is simply one of the more tempting targets.

Unless the Internet is to be changed into a pay-as-you-go system, in
which merely sending a *packet* to an external host is expected to
carry with it the "promise" of payment if the receiving host decides
it didn't care to receive it, email won't go in this direction with
any useful degree of success.

OTOH, I think it's possible that email (or, perhaps more likely and
more elegantly, something like my GUIXP idea) will evolve to the point
where software agents negotiating a transaction (such as the exchange
of an email containing, or allegedly containing, a particular kind of
*content*) might have the *option*, based on profiles of the persons
or organizations on whose behalf their acting, of executing a contract
that includes financial remuneration under different scenarios.

We're not too far away from that idea already.  A consultant offering
arbitrary clients answers to technical questions, whose web site
allows them to pay via PayPal, might, in another few years, be using
his own software agent to perform substantial aspects of the
negotiations over payments.

In a scenario like that, it's the receiving party that would be
expected to pay the *sender* of an email, since the email contains
information more useful to the receiver than to the sender.

Email *itself*, therefore, needn't, and probably shouldn't, impose a
substantially higher penalty on its use over whatever people pay to
access the Internet in the first place, because, first and foremost,
it's a *communications* medium.

And, as a communications medium, the costs to use it are best spread
out among *all* of those who have access to it, since its
availability, not just it's actual use, represents substantial value
to anyone who is online, as well as substantial expense to maintain as
an infrastructure.  It's a "commons", akin to roadways.

-- 
James Craig Burley
Software Craftsperson
<http://www.jcb-sc.com>