… in a comment on an article on Slashdot (the article wasn’t very good, but the comment’s quite interesting):

Billing for service (and for backbone usage) is coming, and coming fast from a thousand different directions.

The question you should be asking is this: How much would email and internet access have to cost for you to stop using it.

Because the answer is scary. And the big corporations know it.

Sounds true to me. The trouble is that email, at this point, is deeply flawed - there’s no way to know if the people are getting a message you send them; they might all be hitting spam filters and you’d never know. I think that that is one big limiting factor on the value of email. Other then that, there’s the knowledge that there’s no commonly-used secure way to send and receive email; so everything confidential still has to come through lettermail. I mean, I know some people sign email with PGP keys and the like; but I don’t think that that will ever become a common enough thing to be relied upon for secure email.