If you have a phone, you can call anyone you like. The recipient doesn’t have to answer, but the network is an open API, available to anyone. The Bell System began as an actual networked system–many companies, using the same protocol, shared calls with each other. When Bell got greedy and stopped interconnecting, phone use became annoying–several phones on your desk, or there were simply people you couldn’t call. AT&T interconnected when it was finally more profitable to own the standard than to block it, and the government mandate then locked that in and led to the phone system we have now.
Email caught on and persisted for the same reason, but more so. There was never “the email company.” Instead, there’s a protocol, and anyone can send and receive. For free.
It’s hard to overstate how profound the idea of permission-less contact was to the flow of information and the growth of commerce and culture. Just as you could mail a letter to a stranger, you could also call or email them. When it works, it’s very powerful.
Friction was the key. Stamps cost money. Phone calls required an account and a human to dial.
The first real challenge for most users wasn’t crank calls or wrong numbers. It was spammers. Computer users who would send thousands or millions of emails or phone calls at a time, taking advantage of asymmetry. It cost them nothing, but it cost each recipient something.
Usenet, the original internet discussion layer, died from this asymmetry. No one had an incentive to create filters or clean it up at scale, so people stopped showing up.
Even with free email, the first generations of spam were mostly uneconomic, and much of it was stopped by filters. No one liked the noise, but email was useful enough that we put up with some spam.
Multiply spam by AI and the cloud and VOIP, though, and it’s obvious that open networks can’t survive. 30 junk SMS notices in one day is more than enough to turn off your notifications. How many voicemails about an approved business loan need to show up before the signal-to-noise ratio becomes simply noise?
We’re going to need to create a cost for the sender (so it can’t scale to ridiculous) as well as an identity layer (so scammers can’t be fully anonymous–reputation is earned, not invented). It might be an open protocol in the spirit of the best parts of the net, or it might be a single monopolist that figures out how to extract value from it.
A thousand years ago, people built walls around their villages because criminal marauders with nothing to lose would destroy open cities. The scale of the new digital marauding is going to be so large (and it’s coming so fast) that we’re about to see a fundamental shift in how we contact each other and who we trust.
I have no idea what it looks like on the other side of this transition, but the assumptions we’ve always made about open communication with strangers are about to change.