I watched Repo Men tonight. I’ve been catching up lately on movies I’ve wanted to see since I have the time to spare. I wasn’t much for this one to be honest but was pleasantly surprised by some of the philosophical points it raised. Backstory: The Union, a corporation specializing in making artificial organs (“forks” as they’re called), operates under the same model as any company that sells expensive products the majority of Americans can’t afford up front – they put you on a payment plan. What happens when you can’t pay for that new shiny liver or fast heart? They repossess it by force as they would a car or home.
It’s a bit corny of an idea but the theme got me thinking. Now, here’s where I probably show my true dork nature. I was thinking in the movie what would happen if the same sort of mentality were applied to email. Think about it. An email represents a single event. Fire and forget. But, it’s not really forgotten by the domain host aggregating inbound mail. If we believe the article that came out last year about the major ISPs in the US and their respective footprints, that’s 226.4 MM unique inboxes held in the US. The population of the US is 307 MM. That’s 74% of people covered theoretically by an inbox if you spread out the number of inboxes for each man, woman and child in the US. Of course this is wrought with statistical peril but for the intentions of this posting, the gist is that postmasters at the 4 largest ISPs in the nation have a lot of oversight.
Now, apply this to the theme of the movie and the following questions popped into my head.
What would happen if ISPs…
- …decided to allow email to not be a static event but rather had leases on email. For instance, as a sender, if an email made it through to a recipient, you would have to pay for that email to be accessible past a certain grace period. Otherwise, the ISP would reach in and swipe the email later if a fee wasn’t paid. They own the data so they can do what they want with it within the law. If you don’t like it, as a recipient, you can just host your own mail server (which wouldn’t exactly work for Grandpa who wants to get stupid e-cards for holidays).
- …a royalty was collected by ISPs when a conversion occurred with an email. Granted this would be hard to track, but they could just stick senders with the fee they assumed was possible since they can track clickthroughs and assess landing pages. This could lead into a whole slew of complicated rules around email hierarchy, delivery rates and times. Sort of like Tony Soprano watching over your inbox.
- …started charging senders for every complaint received. While in theory this would probably do a lot of good for the email ecosystem, it could be heavily abused to artificially drive complaint numbers up to extort money or just punish legitimate senders for having a bad send (as with the “oopsie” email).
- …charged recipients more than they already do in some cases to send an email out without a forced lag to cause an inconvenience on the sender. I can imagine hitting the send button and then seeing an interstitial page counting down from 100 or some other high enough number to get under my skin to where I just go ahead and pay the fee to have the sending process sped up. Think about it. Cable companies already seem to do this. They charge me for the “turbo” class of high speed internet whereas it used to be one price fits all. I’m highly suspicious of whether they really created a new speed where things can be crammed down the pipes faster or they just tiered out the bandwidth and now charge a premium for having the same speed you did before.
- …akin to a FedEx or UPS, charging for the size of the email being sent. Sending a quick one line plain text email v. one with heavy page weight and attachments could mean a difference in what could eventually add up to a lot of money for mass senders.
- …implemented a tax just to be able to send email in the first place, such as CentMail.
This isn’t a rant against ISPs. It’s just some insight into what could potentially be. I hope it never happens, but going back to the movie, I doubt anyone ever thought companies would repossess organs either. Look around today. We’ve got a lot of things that were created in a sense of altruism (I suppose) which have turned into money making machines. Hospitals – “oh, you didn’t want that extra bag of saline during your surgery? Too bad. And by the way, it costs $1k. Pay up.” Federal housing lenders Freddie Mac and Sally Mae – “even though we were conceived after the Great Depression to help folks get into homes, we went belly up because we were busy investing in the secondary markets profiting off companies offering sub prime loans.” Or even schools – “Dear Coke, Please purchase a spot on our football field marquee so we can afford to get the team new equipment this year. We’re hitting the NRA up next.”
We like to believe that major corporations won’t slice and dice their way through the human condition to turn a profit. And if government and society is doing its job, this usually doesn’t happen. But, what if? ISPs are hurting for money these days and looking for every new and creative way to keep their email divisions afloat. Who knows if one day we see a newly created ISP Gestapo reigning down on the recipients’ rights.
Thoughts? Have I officially lost all of my marbles? Would more ISP intervention monetizing the email pathway be a good thing?
