Elon Musk wants to do on Twitter what Gates did not achieve 20 years ago with the mail: this was his failure

Elon Musk and Bill Gates they don’t usually agree on many things. We have seen it in his vision of work or how to deal with some of the world’s great problems. But now, with Elon Musk at the helm of Twitter, he is planning a similar idea to end the social network’s biggest problems much like one Gates once tried to plot for email. Although, and this may be bad for Musk, it didn’t turn out well for him.

And it is that two decades ago Gates also considered charging people for internet services that had always been free.

We collect information after these days of so much movement. Musk will ask Twitter users to pay $8 a month to access special featuresincluding one that is currently free to public figures, the blue checkmark.

But the main reason at least according to Musk, it’s addressing Twitter’s biggest problem: spam. Musk said charging for verification is “the only way to beat bots and trolls.”

Gates already had his anti-spam crusade on email

Musk joked that he “stole the idea of ​​charging for insults and arguments from Monty Python”, but more likely he stole it – perhaps unconsciously – from Gates. The last time a tech billionaire talked so much about spam was almost 20 years ago.when the Microsoft co-founder testified before the US Senate about the email.

In 2003, he denounced that spam accounted for half of all email sent, described the technology Microsoft was developing to combat it, and supported an effort to legislate it.

A year later, Gates expanded on the spam problem at the World Economic Forum. He described the three ways that Microsoft was addressing this problem. The first two solutions consisted of variations of a kind of ‘captcha’ or test to validate that the emails were being sent by people.

The third was more controversial. Gates said that the strangers would have to buy some kind of digital postage stamp. The idea was to implement a nominal fee that would be very cheap – we are talking about fractions of cents – but that would be a huge expense for those who made massive spam shipments.

Microsoft used a position of dominance then

In fact, Microsoft was well positioned at the time to force such a radical change.. Its free email service, Hotmail, had, by some estimates, a third of the market. Gmail didn’t exist, for example.

Gates backed down as he began to see that his plan was not being well received at all. Over time, Microsoft was unseated by Google as the dominant email provider. Spam was one of the original reasons Paul Buchheit set out to create Gmail. He tackled it through a reputation system, which has worked pretty well so far, and then they copied other mail platforms.