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Comment by doubloon | Hacker News Reader

sometimes i wonder why the internet wound up this way.

was there some alternative development path or is this inherent in the physical network design?

My humble opinion is that it’s inevitable due to inequality. There is money to be made doing this type of thing. Never underestimate the time-rich, money-poor.

There is no downside to doing this. There’s no punishment. So the scanners scan, whoever they are, good or bad.

Even if ISPs quickly shut this stuff down the existence of botnets would allow it to continue.

It’s like spam. Just tragedy of the commons.

Making intended use cases extremely efficient also makes unintended use cases just as efficient?

Micropayments.

If it cost some amount of money to connect to a server, all of this would stop almost immediately.

Somewhere, John Stankey feels a shiver up his spine.

Sure helped the PSTN.

Back when long-distance calls cost real money per minute, yes. You got the occasional telemarketing call, but it was local and in most areas there wasn't much of it happening.

But accessing the PSTN network still has a cost. Simply having a cost is not a blocker for bad actors.

Yes -- the key is a marginal cost for each call that is higher than what they earn on average per call. And that would not be a lot.

Thats not what the original poster described, just that "a" cost would be all thats needed.

And trying to attach a price to a transaction that makes it unprofitable for bad actors but not be a burden on legitimate users is intractable.

The fact is that when a long distance call (never mind an international call) cost on the order of dollars per call there was not much spam.

That cost wasn't designed to prevent bad actors, that cost was designed to generate profit.

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