I was reading over on Release 1.0 about a company called Goodmail which wants to charge for people sending emails. Basically you pay a few pence for each email and they gaurentee that it will be delivered to the recipent.
Esther Dyson puts some good points forward about why it would be an advantagous thing but I think there are still strong reasons again. For a start, the idea that people just want email to be free because it used to be free is somewhat bankrupt in that nobody would want to see a more costs involved even if it was paid for originally and also that email isn’t free. We already pay for it in our ISP fees, or domain and server fees. So adding a sending fee is making us pay twice. Even in the case of webmail such as Hotmail and gMail it costs us in having to endure annoying advertising.
Further more, such examples such as the fact we pay for snail mail I don’t feel support the case. It’s not a good thing we have to pay for stamps. It’s not like we had an open choice to pay or not and choose the paying route, it’s just how our economy/society works. I hardly ever use the mail. Why? Because emails faster and cheaper. Yes, we have massive spam problems. But so does the mail, so does the phone with cold calling.
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This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.