Why the fuck should e-mail cost money? Spamming is illegal and now the vultures at Goodmail want to sell the right to spam your mailbox. What? Mail from Sprint is just as much spam as mail from Nigerian 419 hustlers.

Who can afford to pay? America's largest corporations, who will be assured of now flooding your mailboxez with bullshit. New Egg can't afford that, nor can many of the small shops online. You think that won't be a hit for Lush or Kitbag or eBags, or even LL Bean? They will all be hurt by such a plan and their larger competitors.

That's the word. At most, email should cost the bandwidth it takes to send, which I already pay Time Warner plenty for. If you want to make up a new thing and charge money for it, that's fine. Good luck getting people to opt-in to your pay-for-play spam ring.

I also tend to agree with Steve that Esther Dyson is full of it. She's well liked in Silicon Valley, but as far as I can tell that's pretty much because she's a relatively nice person and she's rich. That's cool. Nice rich people are good to have around to buy lunch and coordinate and stuff, but when it comes to ideas and opinions, we live in a meritocracy.

Very few people want to get advertisements in their email. The market will indeed sort this out, and email will remain Free. Any attempt to force "pay for delivery" by a cartel of large ISPs should be busted up like Standard Oil. Ditto a tiering structure online (the devil horns thing in my sidebar) that's backroom-rigged by corporate fatbacks.

I dare the greedheads at AOL to start charging for email. They're already loosing about 10,000 customers a day to superior service providers. Perhaps they can further hasten the decentralization.