This is a very interesting idea(via Dave Winer): the "Penny Black project" at Microsoft.
It involves a number of very clever small shifts in thinking -- the type of thinking that really is the meat of innovation. The two ideas that really struck me:
- The first is making the sender of the email pay -- but in cpu cycles, not in money.
- The second is devising a scheme where the sender pays via some method that could not be defeated by faster and faster computers.
A further thought on this -- the scheme would make mailing list based forums logistically difficult (and perhaps prohibitively expensive to operate). Maybe that is the price we have to pay though.
