It's a fair fee though. It pays for my attention as a recipient. It prevents an externality. It's no different than having to deposit a quarter to take a shopping cart, to incentivize you to return it. A tenth of a cent would probably be just as effective btw; the problem is that you can send a million text messages, wasting a million seconds of other people's time assuming they spend an average of 1 second looking at it, all for far less than the value of all that time wasted.
Why wouldn't this solve the problem? Phone calls have a real cost, however small it may be, to both the recipient and the carriers. Everyone accepts paying for stamps. What makes paying for calls different, and such an abhorrent idea that we shouldn't even discuss it?
EDIT: Parent comment was replaced with something completely different so my reply makes no longer makes sense, but I'm leaving it unchanged.
> In a world where we pay for stamps, why didn't bulk unsolicited mail go away? Why would it work for telephones?
Different situation. Bulk mail is not illegal, in fact the USPS subsidizes it. Spam calls ARE illegal. Hopefully phone carriers will not give discounts for explicitly illegal uses of their networks, but we can deal with that later if it happens.
I think you're saying that the cure described is worse than the disease, and that the bureaucracy to maintain such regulation would expand beyond its original mandate.
I think that's assuming that things always go poorly, and that there is no possible way for it to go well. Sometimes things go well.
Bulk mail is priced to maximize profit to the postal service. Raising the rate 1000% would effectively end bulk mail. Adding a penny cost per spam would be more than a 1000% increase, and would effectively end the spam.
