Times columnist Esther Dyson has come out in support of "Goodmail," a company I've mentioned before that AOL would use as a proxy to charge senders of e-mail to get their messages across "priority," with the ostensible intent of limiting spam. Her arguments in favor of it are full of holes like a giant digital slice of swiss cheese.
Call it net-anarchistic rambling or an ideological rant, but it's really not - the unprecedented ability for people to have free, direct communication with one another on such a large scale and in virtual communities has been changing the way we look at things. Dyson's somewhat smarmy argument on why paying for e-mail is really a good thing doesn't seem to have much heft to it, but htat doesn't necessarily mean people won't fall for it. Here are some highlights:
Dyson writes:
I agree that pretty soon sending most e-mail will cost money, but I think that's only right. It costs money to guarantee quality and safety. Moreover, I think the market will work, and that it will not shut out deserving senders, if we only let it work freely.
I guess it's nice of Dyson to spout some free market non-sequiter about how the invisible hand will somehow sweep away all the spam that clutters up inboxes if only we start charging per e-mail, though it's completely absurd. This isn't "FedEx," as Dyson asserts at another point in the article, it's e-mail - it's not a material item that needs to be insured or that needs to be carried. The "quality and safety" of the item aren't in jeopardy in the same way that it is for packages, nor is there any material handling of the item that requires someone to be paid. An e-mail proxy that you'd pay to get your mail through to someone would be making pure profit by running a program.
In my case, I'd have a list. I'd charge nothing for people I know, 50 cents for anyone new (though if I add the sender to my list after reading the mail, I'll cancel the 50 cents) and $3 for random advertisers. Ex-boyfriends pay $10.
This is cute, but basically nonsensical, and isn't really that great of a joke.
What shocks me most about the opposition to Goodmail is that people who claim to believe in the free and open Internet, with its welcome attitude to innovation, want to shut down an idea. That's wrong.
This argument, on the other hand, isn't that cute at all, and I wish it was, a joke. It borders on reductive psychosis. Just because you endorse a "free and open" Internet doesn't mean you have to be open to every suggestion that has the word "internet" in it. Just because you believe in a free society doesn't mean you have to immediately accept every idea that someone puts out there as "right," especially not if that idea, like this one, would in the long run limit the freedom of that society - it's an argumentum ad absurdum. Dyson's claim is wrong, not the idea that people want to shut down the ridiculous idea of charging for e-mail, which very obviously would limit the ease and freedom with which people communicate over the internet. This isn't an affront to people who want e-mail to remain free, it's an affront to reason.
If people like those little stamps that mark their mail as safe and wanted or as commercial transactions, then let the customers have them. And let other companies compete with Goodmail to offer better and less expensive service.
More absurdity. Customers haven't asked to have these sorts of services, they haven't asked to be charged - they've asked to stop spam. The idea that they only way you can cut down on it is by charging people to send e-mail is ludicrous. It's like saying that charging people to join health clubs is stopping obesity.
Goodmail isn't good because it's new, but neither is it bad because it's new. If it's a good model, it will succeed and improve over time. If it's a bad model, it will fail. Why not let the customers decide?
The customers, in this case, haven't decided anything in the first place! Dyson is trying to spin this like it's a full on democratic solution to the problem of spam, and it's not. The desire of people to make money off of your e-mails while they sit around doing nothing is ancillary to the problem of spam. Instituting some sort of charge and then asking people if they like it or not doesn't amount to a democratic choice, it's top-down enforcement. Will people like it if they don't get spam and have to pay money to avoid it? Maybe. Will they like it better if more intelligent filtering technology is developed or anti-spam legislation is introduced and enforced? Of course. Dyson isn't defending peoples' right to spam-free inboxes, she's living in a dream world where supporting some cockamamie venture capitalist's plan to take advantage of people and screw with the ingrained democratic-communicative potential of the internet will somehow plug all the leaks in the system.
