I heard this news first on the radio this morning, and was glad to see the article on CNN: CNN.com - Groups?unite to fight bulk e-mail fee - Feb 28, 2006

I think it's inevitable that bulk emailers (and thus spammers) will eventually end up paying for the privilege of emailing everyone on the planet several times a day.

Two points in this article stood out to me:

"We cannot pay for the service, we don't have the money," Frydman said. "We have been doing this for 11 years based on the standards of Internet communication. Those standards do not include paying for service. This one company is trying to transform unilaterally how the Internet works."

My response to this would be: things change. Times change. It's really no different than a company offering a free service for several months and, once they're proven their business model (and, not incidentally, hooked you on it), start charging for it.

No one is proposing (at least not yet) that every piece of email that anyone sends be charged. And even here, they're not proposing that anyone be required to pay to send email--they're saying that if you pay, then you get preferential treatment, like almost everything else in this world.

Or like free, limited trials of software--if you can make do with the "lite" version, many times you can get it free. If you want the full-featured version, you're required to pay for it.

The other comment that I thought was interesting was this one:

"We're a grassroots organization," said William Green, president of RightMarch.com. "We're not funded by big donors. If we're sending 2 to 3 million e-mails a week, paying a penny per e-mail will price us out."

Well, frankly, hallellujah.

I'm all for free speech, but when I get home and have to wade through several hundred emails to find a half dozen real ones, or spend an entire evening configuring the spam filters on my email client, it makes me wonder. Or when I pay $1.50/hour at the internet café in Mexico to download 850 messages after I've been offline for two days, just so I can see if there are any problems at work I need to take care of.

My opinion is that free speech doesn't include 850 people throwing something at me every day that I'm expected to catch and deal with. There's junk snail mail, too, of course, but since they do have to pay for that, it ends up being about 3-4 pieces a day, not the hundreds of spam emails that someone like me who has been on the internet a long time gets.