Linux Weekly News posted an article about Bill Gates' solution to spam—essentially, it's the old proposition that charging "postage" on email will cause mass-mailers to think twice. (The LWN article is subscriber-only until February 12, but the Gates speech was widely reported).

I posted a comment on why the suggestion is idiotic, but I liked it enough that I reposted it here:

I wish people would stop with the "email postage" idea. It is a BAD SOLUTION. Ignoring all the problems mentioned in the [LWN] article, the premise itself is short-sighted.

If we assume we can actually build this postage system thingy, and then make the bigger assumption that it will stop spam without destroying the efficiency and convenience of email entirely, what will spammers do? Concentrate their efforts on instant messaging? Develop better software to create weblog comment spam? Auto-dial our wireless VoIP phones and play recorded messages? Maybe download advertisements directly into our brains with our neural uplinks?

The point is that putting all of our effort into designing a system specifically to tackle the RFC822 world would just push spammers into other net-based communications systems, where we'd have to start from the ground up to implement a totally new solution. (What's that you say? We'll just extend the postage system and start charging 5 cents to make a VoIP phone call? What a great idea! And a penny to send an instant message... Oh, no! My Internet bill is higher than my car insurance, because I'm paying for services with totally artificial prices!)

What we need is to create some sort of filtering or authentication system that can be applied to all Internet communications, and imposes technical limitations rather than economic ones. SPF is a step in the right direction, by adding authenticity to the sender address and accountability for abuse, and the concept can be extended to any IP communications. Once the offenders are identified, it will be much easier to filter them out than when they hide behind anonymous (and unaware) zombie relays. Maybe if the use of public key encryption software was more wide-spread, we could extend the accountability all the way down to the user, giving everybody the capability to filter and blacklist at the level at which the abuse takes place rather than indiscriminately blacklisting entire ISPs.

I wish all the hub-bub about email postage was refocused on a solution that would last longer than the keyboard-oriented human-computer interface, and didn't favor economically-advantaged users.