- S. Fahlman. 2002. Selling interrupt rights: A way to control unwanted e-mail and telephone calls. Abstract: Among the great irritations of modern life are un-wanted e-mail (often referred to as " spam " 1) and unwanted telephone calls. In this article I present an approach to controlling these intrusions. The key idea is simple: My attention is a valuable commodity. If you (the sender) want to interrupt me by putting a message in my e-mailbox or by making my telephone ring, you must pay me for the privilege of doing so. More precisely, you must make a binding offer to pay me. If I am happy to hear from you, I will decline the payment; otherwise, I will collect it. This payment compensates me for suffering an unwanted interruption and—more important-ly—it has cost you something to bother me. Since interrupting me is no longer free, advertisers and fund-raisers will no longer choose to send me repetitive , poorly targeted, low-yield messages. Each recipient can set his or her own price. For example , I might set the potential cost of sending an e-mail message to me at $1.00. If you want my phone to ring, the potential cost would be $5.00, or perhaps more if you call at dinnertime or early in the morning. Of course, my friends and business associates would never actually pay these fees. I would only collect the fee from callers who have annoyed me. But once I have been interrupted, it's my decision whether to collect the fee, not the sender's. People in the public eye may have to set their price much higher to avoid constant interruptions. People who are not bothered much by these messages might charge only a few cents—just enough to discourage the truly indiscriminate mass marketers. Here's the catch: Such a system will only be accepted if we can make it relatively painless and hassle-free, both for the owners of phones and e-mail accounts and for their nonspamming friends and associates. In the rest of this article, I suggest some ways in which we might accomplish that. There have been a number of proposals to combat spam through the use of a delivery fee, to be optionally collected by the message recipient. The idea of an " e-stamp " fee for e-mail is generally attributed to Esther Dyson (see Reference 2, for example). Brad Templeton's proposal is a version of e-stamps.
