Spam spam spam (part 1)
Executives at AOL, MSN and Yahoo! were obviously reading my blog several months ago about the easiest way to put an end to spam. They announced today a plan to work together to create a whitelist of permission marketers (and, one assumes, that leads to a blacklist of everyone else).
Missing from this equation is the key part, imho—friction. I think we need to charge something (just a penny is enough) to make it expensive to send huge amounts of email where the expected return is quite low.