I want emails, phone calls, and texts sent to me to cost the sender some fixed amount of money… which is refunded only if I send a return token confirming it was not spam. For previous contacts or people in my organizations this refund would be automatic.
>I want emails, phone calls, and texts sent to me to cost the sender some fixed amount of money… which is refunded only if I send a return token confirming it was not spam.
I've thought about that type of spam refund scheme many times and I like it but the potential problem I see with it is the unintended effect of even more spam that you can't ignore by the companies you already have a business relationship with that bill you monthly.
E.g. You get a monthly bill from Comcast to pay for cable tv. With a new hypothetical "spam refund" law, they now abuse it to their advantage by adding a new "Customer Information Updates" fee for $5 to the bill. (They won't call it "marketing fee" or "promotional fee" but something innocuous like "information fee".) The cable company can now can send you more spam by using the "spam refund" law against you.
But... the customer can get a "rebate" on that extra $5 fee by responding to spam and "refunding" it back to the cable company. If the customer chooses to ignore the spam and never refund it, the customer ends up paying the $5 extra fee on the monthly bill. The customer is now paying oneself to to receive more spam that they can't ignore.
A potential spam refund scheme needs protections to prevent abuse like the above.
As the commenter you’re responding to said, just add the cable company to your contacts and the refund is automatic. Opt out of any emails from them other than billing notices.
No, people don't want to pollute their contacts listing by adding every company they have a billing relationship as a new entry to "manage spam". It's visual pollution to have "Comcast" as a useless entry alphabetically in between "Charlie" and "David" just to offset a new spam rebate scheme because Comcast is abusing the law. And if Comcast has multiple identities such as creating "Comcast Updates" and "Comcast New Channels", etc to further abuse the spam rebate scheme for more customer "engagement", you're doing even more digital housekeeping and adding more entries to the contacts listing.
Another problem is that the smartphone's "contacts listing" is a special area that has downstream interactions with other smartphone settings to manage/filter notifications and sounds. E.g. "silence notifications not in contact listing" or "block calls not in contact listing". By adding Comcast into the contacts listing, they can become even more invasive in your life by polluting alerts on your home screen and making your phone ring.
The spam rebate idea can have some weird unintended side effects if such a scheme (or law) is not crafted carefully to prohibit abuse and make life worse.
I'd argue strongly against your premise: people specifically do want to note their established vendor relationships (subscription services, doctors' offices, schools, government services, utilities) if only so that they can distinguish legitimate from illegitimate contact attempts, but also to manage different groups of known contacts differently.
This presumes a few advances, such as reliable caller-ID systems (this is presently not the case for North Amercian dialing systems). Friends who are innundated with robocalls noted that they'd received a call spoofing an entity with whom they do have a relationship, however it was clear from the call characteristics that it was not a legitimate call --- among other factors, the caller identified themselves as being from a different entity, which is a pretty low bar.
The problem of mega-services (financial, comms, federal government, etc.) being subject to spoofing simply because so many people have interactions / relationships with them is an extant problem. But odds are pretty good that your local water / sewer / trash / gas / electric service will be less universal, and knowing that they're calling when they do in fact call is useful.
It seems you're associating a contacts list with a friends list. That's not the case. Your contacts are, well, your contacts, and different contacts have different roles. Among other factors, you might set, say, different contact rules, priorities, and ringtones for, say, immediate family, work, casual social contacts, and business entities. The latter would generally not be permitted to call outside regular business hours, and you might specifically restrict them around mealtimes or other inconvenient times of day (redirecting to voicemail or another messaging service, say).
It would be simple to have a ‘whitelist’ for contacts that are free but low priority and get muted, put in a special folder, or auto deleted. It’s cold contacts from anonymous senders that are impossible to reliably auto screen.
Email providers/phone should have hierarchical contact lists. Comcast can go in the lowest rung, maybe call it subscription services, and your spouse is in the highest rung, in the family group. Each rung comes with its own abilities with respect to notifications, calls, sounds, etc. Have a button at the bottom of every email to add the sender to a group if not already there, and that would handle your spam rebate scheme automatically.
I don't think so. The idea is that you could set the fee so low that a normal person would never ever encounter it, but when multiplied against the number of bulk emails a spammer sends out becomes a real cost. And at that point you could allot everyone a small credit sufficient for even vigorous personal use.
You could also have a periodic forgiveness of de minimus amounts.
The Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system charges 10¢ per page. Every month, balances under $10.00 (edit: apparently it's $30.00 per quarter) are forgiven. It strikes me that a similar model could be employed. Are there people who send more than 100 unsolicited texts per month? More than 200?
I didn't know about that, thank you, and yes exactly. The difference between normal use and spam is so marked that any system of charges could be set such that no normal user was ever even aware of them.
And to be clear I'm not talking 'normal' as in 'median' I'm talking 'human using their thumbs'. Even if you spend all day every day hunting down craigslist bargains and coordinating swaps
True this, and a far lower ding, closer to say, $0.01 than $10, could still be quite effective.
Keep in mind that egregious robocall providers have been making billions of calls annually (55 billion in 2023: <https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/16/americans-received-55-mi...>), whilst a typical instance was unable to pay a $10 million fine (<https://therecord.media/ftc-settles-with-company-that-facili...>). At that rate, a per-call ding of only $0.0002 (2 hundredths of a cent) might prove sufficient. A penny-per-call penalty should actually be relatively effective against the lowest of the bottom-feeders, though a higher rate would afford additional protections.
