Exponential 'difficulty of use' graphs for sending e-mail
Tom Coates, plasticbag.org (see here): We already have a low-budget tool that is designed for mass publishing, and that tool is the web - ultimately democratic in that people can publish on it whenever they want and given the extra advantage of being immediately an opt-in way of viewing content...
Introducing a pay-per-mail system, and deploying this world wide, which is a requirement for the whole thing to work as expected anyway, would be a great challenge both technically and politically.
If we're talking about such great changes to one of the corner stones of the Internet infrastructure, we might just as well imagine a completely different solution replacing the old technology. One example - which resembles how the web works today, and which would perhaps solve or lay a foundation for a solution to the problem that a pay-per-mail system addresses - is Dan Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 system.
Using this system, the greater part of the cost of distributing mass e-mails would fall on the sender. It's an interesting concept.
