>From that website:
"Electronic email is not at economic equilibrium, primarily because the cost
of sending spam is more or less non-existent in the online world. It costs
spammers almost nothing to send their material," Leung writes.
Leung reckons response rates to bulk commercial email is less than 0.005 per cent. That means that a typical email message appeals to 50 people and annoys 999,950. Brightmail chief exec Enrique Salem recently told El Reg that scammers only need one in a million respondents to phishing emails to make the con worthwhile."
WS: This has an important political and philosophical implication. Internet can be conceived as an approximation of a nearly perfectly distributive system built on the principle "according to one's needs." It clearly demonstrates that while such arrangement may well serve many, a few fucks can effectively derail such a system.
There reason is that there is no transaction cost that can keep bad behavior in check. The economics of spam would be effectively killed if the senders were to bear the transaction cost that is proportional to the volume of messages they send. If adding a name to the "To:" header automatically resulted in adding a charge to the sender's account, spam would disappear overnight.
The question is, therefore, how to kill spam without killing the free access to information, which is an undeniable strength of internet. One solution is a progressive fee structure: no per-address fee for the first x messages sent during a fixed time period, a modest fee for the first Y messages above that limit, a higher fee for the messages above the second limit, etc. I understand that there might be some difficulties, i.e. how to charge off-shore spammers, but I think they are technically solvable.
The bottom line is, however, that the utopian socialist dream "everyone according to his needs" - is, well, an unrealistic dream.
Wojtek