... but I feel uncomfortable with such ideas:
Companies should in the future acquire the electronic equivalent of a stamp if they want to be sure that their email reaches the recipients. For fees of up to one cent per message, the mails sent via the service provider Goodmail Systems will be forwarded without spam filtering and confirmed as received.
When will emails from private individuals no longer be delivered unless they go through one of the large providers participating in the payment system? When will citizens' networks or privately operated providers be excluded because they cannot belong to the club of payers?
The possibly upcoming argumentation is simple: only those who pay to a central authority for their website will be enabled for HTTP access in the mandatory proxy of the large providers - because otherwise they are suspected of being a phishing site. And soon, outside of email, some sites would simply no longer exist. It also fits perfectly with the efforts of telcos and cable providers in the USA, who also want to deliver paid content (i.e., content paid for by the telcos) on a priority basis.
Apart from the fact that I definitely trust my own filters more than filters operated for payment by some company on the net. When will there be the first scandal that a spammer has bought access? My statistical spam filter on my server is not corruptible - not perfect, but also not corruptible.
In the establishment of further central filters and control points, I see a real danger to the structure of the Internet - how quickly companies are bought, one could see in recent times. And even if a company like Yahoo today possibly - due to the necessary positioning against Google - is a bit on a cozy course with the user, who guarantees that a media giant does not take over the whole thing? Not everyone is as incompetent as Time Warner ...