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January 17, 2008

EMAIL Hell - Time-Warner Doesn't Get It Right

There is way too much garbage flying around the Internet, but charging people for downloads is punishing the victim.

Now I want to pause for a moment to be fair to Time-Warner. They claim that a small percentage of users are pulling down a disproportionately high amount of bandwidth. From that perspective, asking high-volume customers for more money makes sense. However, like the Alternative Minimum Tax, the surcharges will eventually trickle down to even the most casual users. That's a serious problem, because if you're being charged for bandwidth, you're going to be paying for every spam email, every incoming worm, and every on-screen video that vies for your attention, even if you ultimately don't see them.

See, your security software is running on your PC, not on the web server. It has to read the email before it can shunt it to your spam folder. It has to see the script files before it can check for a virus signature. It's going to download the video even if you don't want to listen to it.

All these problems can be fixed, but we're still attacking the problem from the wrong direction. If we want to clean up the internet, we need to make it more expensive to send EMAIL and to transmit a video, not the other way around. It's like campaign finance reform. We're trying to keep big donors out of politics, but the donors always find a way around the regulations. The truth is that in a regulated economy, there is a tremendous economic benefit to having a politician on the payroll. Until that changes, campaign finance reform is doomed to fail. Similarly, as long as you can send out spam for free, spammers will find new ways to fool spam filters.

If we're going to try to rationalize the cost of Internet traffic, that has to be the starting point.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

# At Thu 2:02 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More EMAIL Hell | Tags: anti-spam campaign finance reform conservative economics Internet politics spam taxes Time-Warner

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