- Invent digital cash
- Automatically discard any email unless it has 1p attached
Charging for email has been proposed before. I presume the reason it hasn't taken off is that we haven't solved step 1. (At least, not in a way that has been widely adopted.) Typically, it's instead suggested that the ISP should charge for emails. And no-one likes that idea.
It may be that step 1 is insoluble. In that case, this is not a good proposal. Perhaps the title of this post should be "What's the first thing we should do, if we ever invent digital cash."
The nice thing about this proposal is that it's fairly robust. If 1p doesn't do it, charge 10p. If your friends balk at sending you 10p, ask them to return the 10p you sent them. Or whitelist them.
Here's an example criticism of the approach:
One suggestion of actually charging everyone a penny per email is rife with unsolvable issues: who controls the money? Who determines "exempt" status for non-profits? How do poor people or poor countries pay a penny per email? These problems are politically insurmountable.
Those are good questions, but calling them unsolvable seems a bit harsh. Here is an attempt at solutions: The money is controlled by the issuing bank. (Figuring out how the issuing bank issues the cash is part of the problem of step 1, so I'm avoiding this question to a large extent.) Non-profits should not be exempt since, presumably, we don't want non-profits sending spam. Poor people will have the same problems finding 1p to send you an email as they do getting the internet connection in the first place. If you think that those problems are are a moral issue – and they might be – please send the poor a lot of emails. (That is flippant but intended to be serious.)
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