Scott E. Fahlman tackles in this paper (pdf) one of todays greatest pains in the ass: Unwanted calls by telemarketers and unsolicited e-mails by spammers. They demand too much of our valuable attention. Fahlman’s solution is easy: Let’s make them pay for it.
More precisely Fahlman suggests that the spammers have to make a binding offer to pay me for the privilege of letting my phone ring or delivering an e-mail message. After listening to the message or reading the mail I will decide whether I collect or decline the payment.
His proposed solutions has three parts:
1. The receiver has a whitelist of friends whose message is always delivered.
2. The receiver can give out interrupt tokens to business partners, the car mechanic or whoever has a legitimate need to contact her, but is not friend enough to be included in the whitelist. The token can be attached to a message, guarantees the deliverance and allows the holder to a specific access (only during business hours, one time call only, …)
3. Uninvited callers or mailers must risk a fee to reach you. The fee is kept in escrow. If the receiver considers the message as a waste of time, she keeps the money.
This system builds incentives for telemarketers and advertisers to better target their messages, otherwise it is not going to be cheap for them.
Although, I really like the idea of directly earning money in exchange for you attention, I doubt that such a system would ever be working.
The main critique of this system is already contained in the paper: “Such a system will only be accepted if we can make it relatively painless and hassle-free”. I think such a system will never reach the simplicity and comfort of existing e-mail or telephone systems. It it is too complicated to learn relatively to the advantages it delivers.
Secondly. There are complicated modes of communication than 1-to-1. For instance, if I send an e-mail to two friends that whitelist me. One of them answers everyone but is not on the whitelist of my other friend. How does that e-mail get through without hassle? And this is only a simple example of communication that might even be much more complicated.
Third. Who guarantees that this system is not going to be hacked? For instance, it is very is easy to pass whitelist filters by using wrong identities (There is no one to prevent me from sending e-mail from the address george.w.bush@whitehouse.org.)
Fourth. There is a certain kind of message, that is really important for the receiver but not important for the sender (e.g. “Your house is burning”). If someone who passes my burning house has to pay to reach me, he won’t tell me.
The paper:
Fahlman, Scott E. (2002). Selling Interrupt Rights. A way to control unwanted e-mail and telephone calls. IBM Systems Journal, Vol 41/No 4/2002. Retrieved 25.8.2008 from www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/414/forum.pdf.
By the way: Scott Fahlman is the inventor of the smiley emoticon 
