Oh, yay, Bill Gates is saying that people should have to pay for e-mail in hopes of eliminating spam. Of course, the big media is picking-up on this like it’s his big idea, yet it’s been discussed (if not implemented in some shape or form) on the internet for years.

Though postage proposals have been in limited discussion for years — a team at Microsoft Research has been at it since 2001 — Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Details came last week as part of Microsoft’s anti-spam strategy. Instead of paying a penny, the sender would “buy” postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender’s good faith.

Personally I think putting a price on sending an e-mail, whether it’s monetary or not, is fundamentally opposed to the premise which the internet was built on– free information. Not to mention, I don’t think there would be a good solution for non-profit mailing lists (I’m on a couple of handfuls). Once non-profits have to start paying for e-mail via money and/or machine time, many of these resources will die.

As much as I hate spam, and at the surface think this idea looks promising, I think people should spend more time on creating some sort of reverse authentication systems invisible to pretty much everyone except mail server operators rather than passing the buck onto the end-user.