At best the filter bypass is a restoration of the ordinary level of service. It takes quite a stretch to call that “premium.” You can blame the collateral damage on the spammers and phishers if you like, and you can blame the plight of the New Orleans residents in the superdome on Katrina too. Just because spammers are evil doesn’t absolve the filterers from duties of care.

Anyway, your comment about the red cross is beside the point. Nobody has objected to certification — that is a premium service and go ahead and charge money for it and compete in an open market. People are objecting to an artificial per-email cost, and the precedent it implies.

Perhaps you have done this unaware of the history here. I know it well because I was one of the first to bring up the subject a decade ago before I quickly renounced it. Every month it seems somebody else comes up with the idea of putting an artificial cost on e-mail to stop spam. Often they propose it as an actual e-mail tax. People unaware of how often the idea has had to be beaten down often even trumpet it and say “what a great new idea.” Of course it’s neither new nor great, and if Goodmail’s system is adopted, we’ll see more push for artificial barriers to e-mail, including taxes.

Two things would make a key difference. First, price based on the real cost, not per email sent. Complaint volume may be correlated to emails sent, but charge on the complaints, not on the regular mails. Better yet, charge for the real work — certifying.

Secondly, no kickbacks to the ISPs. The kickback to the ISP makes everybody naturally suspicious that they’re paying for delivery, not certification. And it puts the wrong incentives on ISPs. No wonder people were ready to believe that AOL would make it harder to get whitelisted for free! How will people believe AOL is really working for the user any more if they’re being paid by the mailer? The ISP should work for the user. The kickbacks also make it harder to have a free market. Why should AOL work hard to bless other certifiers who don’t kick back money or kick back less, when they get nice money from those who do?

Systems work better when the money flow reflects the duties. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to design systems in other ways, but one must be particularly wary with email, which is arguably the most important new medium of speech in decades. We must take our freedom of speech very seriously, and take extra care in how we architect the systems of speech.