E-Mail Transfer Payments to Stop Spam

Richard Posner of the Becker-Posner Blog complains about e-mail spam. He writes:

Spam imposes costs (without offsetting benefits) of two kinds. First, most of it is of no interest whatsoever to recipients and some of it is downright offensive; hence receipt imposes a cost. … Second, the cost of filtering out spam (the demand for such filtering being further evidence that spam imposes net costs on most of the people who receive it) to the computer industry, and of “binning” in in hard drives and servers, is already in the billions of dollars a year, for which the spammers don’t pay.

The always-interesting Half Sigma comments about it and links to a previous post he made on the same subject.

I have a simple solution to the spam problem. The e-mail providers should simply charge the e-mail user a fee – maybe 25 cents – for each e-mail sent. The money would not go to the e-mail service or the government (leave them out of this) but to the recipient. If you send as many e-mails as you receive, it evens out, and e-mail is still free. If you receive tons of unsolicited e-mail, you are compensated for this bother. If you are a spammer, it becomes very costly to do business.

The big e-mail providers can easily switch to this kind of service overnight by asking the users to set up a money account when they open an e-mail account. They might ask for a one-time set-up fee of $10, which would pay for 40 e-mails. People like me would still have $10 in their accounts because we receive as much mail as we send. And if you discontinue service, the provider refunds your money.

Now suppose that you had to pay 25 cents to leave a comment on a blog. It would certainly cut down the number of comments, but it might improve the quality. I might actually comment more on the blogs that I like as a simple way of putting a coin in the hat. But I doubt anyone would ever comment on my blog.