Making something free definitely has its costs.
Now, introducing micro-transactions into people‘s communication looks like a straight ticket to hell to me. Reminds me of the early days of SMS when only porn sites, scams and businesses that made you pay for their SMS bills would send you messages.
But it would also have, more importantly, created a revenue stream and normalized microtransactions, which would have created an alternate business model to attention/advertising.
Nobody likes paying for things... but I think the "free" future we're living in is pretty shitty compared to the way things were before.
On spam: we’ve been receiving physical direct spam mail from the dawn of the modern postal service, and the delivery is paid by the sender. Same way on linkedin for instance, recruiters pay to reach inboxes. Same for many other platforms where spamming and shoving content in users’ feed is monetized by the platform itself.
And that’s the bulk of the alternate business models and revenue streams we’re talking about.
Not everything needs to be free, but raising paywalls at the wrong place can have devastating effects on platforms.
I'm sure the amount of email that isn't even seen in modern webmail services would still boggle our minds.
And as far as I see it, platforms are part of the problem.
Marketplaces are better for the customer in the long run.
That is to say, shared infrastructure/basic utilities with many different independent vendors on top each offering goods and services.
But trying to solve these kind of situation with marketplaces only solve them monkey paw style. Marketplaces are for discoverability and supply and demand issues. Fundamentally I don’t want my personal communication to be supply and demand regulated. Instead I want strong enough penalties on entities that flood my inbox.
As you point out spam filters help a lot, but to me regulation was the biggest move: having a one click link to unsubscribe from ads and companies actually respect it reduced my inbox manyfold. Businesses I actually have transactions with were the hardest to filter out, and finally some progress was made in that front.
In general I feel believing marketplace are more than financial systems only leads disappointment. AppStores are the poster child marketplaces, and they’re sure full of scam and predatory content. Online ads are also marketplaces, facebook made user feeds a marketplace etc.
App stores, ad markets (as they exist today, namely Google/Facebook/Amazon), and Facebook user feeds are all beholden-to and -enrich a single operating party. And specifically, an operating party that also competes with many of the offerings in their own "marketplaces". That makes them owned platforms in my book.
That sets up some screwy incentives (e.g. caring about volume over quality, self-preferencing) that substantially degrade the entire experience for buyers/users.
To the email case though, the problem with penalties is that they require a centralized manager. Which is how you get back to Gmail being a de facto standards body. Ugh.
We could always have done net-zero charging on email fees, that I think would have solved the accessibility issues. $0.05 paid to send an email -- $0.05 earned on receipt of an email.
There are lots of problems with Hammurabi's code and I wouldn't suggest emulating this particular implementation, but it's interesting to note just how far back this concern of false accusations goes and how our legal system seems to have backslid a bit in this regard.