Re: Looking at the U in UBE

>Quoting James Craig Burley <[email protected]>:
>
>> >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.
>...
>> 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.
>
>Right, because you never pay to send surface mail.
>
>Or make cell calls
>
>Or long distance
>
>Or to place an advertisement in a shop window

Up to this point, your examples all fall into the category of paying a
centralized resource a *specific* amount to utilize it, in accord with
a usage pattern and economic arrangement in which it makes sense to
"pay as you use".

Counter-examples that pertain specifically to yours:

  You don't pay to make local calls.  You're already paying for the
  right to have access to the infrastructure; economics and usage
  patterns dictate that charging for each local call doesn't make
  sense from the infrastructure owner's point of view; and...  most
  importantly...you don't *pay* people to *accept* your calls!

  You don't pay to place an advertisement on public bulletin boards in
  all sorts of locations.  These are freely available resources that,
  nevertheless, cost time and $$ to maintain, and, like email, can be
  exploited.

>Or buy paper to write on

In an email context, this suggests that, since you buy computers to
compose email on, and buy Internet access, you've *already* paid for
email you send!

And that's the point.  We're *already* paying for email.  It's
therefore rather silly, wasteful, and unworkable to try to foist a
whole new email system based on any built-in idea of pay-per-message.

Consider how people feel when ATMs, which they generally use for
*free* to perform transactions with their money, start charging them
(up front or behind the scenes) per transaction, for whatever reason.

-- 
James Craig Burley
<http://www.theburleys.net>