[ih] Why is there (still) spam...?

[John Levine]

It appears that touch--- via Internet-history <touch at strayalpha.com> said:
>I’m sure all technologies that evolve from costly to relatively cheap end up with “unwanted” traffic. I.e., I doubt anyone
>sent replacement window flyers by Pony Express.

I have read that there was a short lived flat rate telegraph service in the late
1800s which of course failed because it was overun with spam. Any communication
scheme needs some kind of friction or when the cost is zero the quality of the
messages approaches zero, too.

Look at the history of phone spam. For the first century and a half, junk phone
calls were limited both by technology, it was hard to make a lot of phone calls,
and by money, telcos all had reciprocal compensation, the calling telco paying a
per-call or per-minute amount to the called telco that was supposed to reflect
costs. Business phone lines used to make many calls were expensive.

The high point of reciprocal compensation was the early days of cellular
telephony. Most calls were from cell to landline, so the comp flowed to the
incumbent landline companies. That was OK with the cellcos since their per
minute rates more than covered the cost, and the money gave the incumbents an
incentive to connect to the cellcos (which they were required to do, but we know
what happens when a telco doesn't want to do something.)

Then dialup online services happened, the incumbents didn't want to spend money
building modem banks, CLECs stepped in, and the recip comp flowed freely in the
other direction. The incumbents then made a screeching U-turn, insisted that
recip comp was a a terrible idea and bill-and-keep, i.e., no payments, was the
way to go. So that's what we have now everywhere except a handful of high-cost
rural telcos which are another story.

Back in the day, being a telco was hard, connecting to SS#7 was complex, so
there were a small number of telcos, all of whom knew each other since they had
to know where to send the recip comp checks. Now with VoIP, connection is no
harder than connecting to your local ISP, and so we have sleazy anonymous telcos
sending voice spam. STIR/SHAKEN is supposed to put enough identifying info on
the calls to return some accountability but the results so far are mixed.

For anything as cheap and easy to use as e-mail, there will be spam and nobody
has come up with a way to stop it.

R's,
John

PS: If someone is about to propose e-postage, it is a Well Known Bad Idea that
just won't go away. I wrote this white paper explaining why two decades ago and
nothing has changed other than adding a few more zeros to some of the numbers.
https://taugh.com/epostage.pdf

PPS: Other people have explained why forcing all the users to identify themselves
would be a bad idea if it were practical, which it is not.