Flutterby™! : Micropayments for email: wrong!

A few days ago there was a /. link to Eric Allman on The Economics of Spam, yet another argument that micropayments will save us. Now I'm against micropayments because the friction of accounting and making payments raises the price of doing an action a lot, and this is going to become a way for some large company to suck money out of the system.

However, there's another larger issue here: Micropayments won't stop spam any more than long distance fees stopped telephone solicitors. The only thing micropayments might do is make some of the more egregious offenders change their tactics, but it'll up the legitimacy of large companies sending crap, the same way our physical mailboxes are stuffed with annoyances that cost us time and money to dispose of. Right now I'm divided between technical solutions like Brian Warner's Petmail and social solutions like squads of vigilantes leaving the mangled corpses of spammers on display as an example to others.