Bill Gates' Spam Solution Prediction Rings Hollow

From eweek
This month marks the five year anniversary of a bold prediction by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who prophesized at the World Economic Forum in 2004 the spam problem would be solved in two years. Turns out, it was not a Nostradamus moment for IT security.

Predicting security trends is not an exact science.

A prime case in point is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who predicted at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January of 2004 that spam would be "solved" within two years. Fast forward to 2009 – spam remains a nuisance to corporate networks and consumers alike.

A key part of Gates’ prediction was that it we would have the option to charge people to send us e-mails. If a relative sent you an e-mail, for example, you could let it in for free. However, if the e-mail came from an unknown address, you could charge them money.

That system obviously never materialized, in part because of the difficulties that would occur in administering the payment process and properly validating e-mail senders.

"Charging (for) e-mail usage simply doesn’t work, because we can’t track down spammers today,” noted Chenxi Wang, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Spammers are typically using bots to send bulk emails, and often times bots come with their own e-mail servers or use an e-mail server that is in a separate jurisdiction (e.g., in Russia). I am not sure how one would go about enforcing an acceptable charge mechanism.”
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