Gates: Pass the Buck, End the SPAM
SPAM is an intolerable pest that annoys every connected citizen. Bill Gates seems to think that Microsoft is on track to take down the demon once and for all. How long you ask? By 2006 ("Two years from now, spam will be solved" he said). The techniques laid out by Gates are, for the most part, both intuitive and known through the Anti-SPAM industry.
As noted in the report:
But the most promising, Gates said, was a method that would hit the sender of an e-mail in the pocketbook.
People would set a level of monetary risk - low or high, depending on their choice - for receiving e-mail from strangers. If the e-mail turns out to be from a long-lost relative, for example, the recipient would charge nothing. But if it is unwanted spam, the sender would have to fork over the cash.
“In the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant,” Gates predicted.
It's not clear exactly how one might exact this payment, but seemingly a worldwide registry would need to be established that provided legitimate means to trace the origins of a message to a responsible party. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a lot of coordination. It seems that once a problem has grown large enough, as the SPAM issue surely has, that a much larger force or movement, capable of stemming distribution at the most active hubs, is the only solution that can eradicate the problem as a whole. Microsoft is large, but are they influential enough to keep from falling down?