TLDR: Utopia solves the problem of bothersome solicitation and other spam by requiring a monetary deposit in order to make contact, which the recipient can choose to either refund or to have the government/telecom tax.
Prerequisites: None
Utopia’s restrictions on advertising make things like billboards far less of a problem. But there are a cluster of deeper attention problems that persist, even if advertisers are legally required to only advertise to those who opt-in:
Salespeople, political canvassers, and others can still disrupt people’s time by checking whether they are allowed to advertise to that person.
Spammers can operate in legal gray areas by claiming things like “I was just providing information, not advertising” and betting that nobody who values their time enough to care will bother trying to sue over something so petty.
Criminals can advertise illegally by hiding their identity, operating outside of a local government, or otherwise making a bet that they won’t get caught.
It seems to me that no amount of purely governmental action can really solve these problems and eliminate spam without becoming tyrannical in the process (e.g. by mass-surveillance). What is needed is a technological solution. And thankfully, it’s not even that complex.
Doorbells
Let’s start with the front door. If a local government wants to discourage solicitation, it can mandate: if a house has a special kind of doorbell, and a non-resident knocks on the door or uses a method besides the doorbell of getting the attention of those in the house, they are breaking the law and the residents can simply call the cops on them.1
The special doorbell has a light to show it’s active, and method for depositing some amount of money.2 The specific quantity of money might be a flat value chosen by the local government, or perhaps a value chosen by the resident, or some combination, where the government sets a menu of prices and each resident picks from that menu. Since the point of the deposit is to discourage bothering many people, I’m imagining a fairly small quantity of money, such as $5.
When a deposit has been made the doorbell makes a chime inside the house. If the door stays closed, the money is refunded after a short period of time, since there’s no harm done ringing the doorbell of an empty home. If the door is opened, however, a circuit is broken, and the money is only refunded a short period after the door closes.
A button on the inside of the door disables this automatic refund, thus punishing someone who bothered the occupants by ringing the bell. To keep incentives3 fair, the deposited money is sent to a fund in the local government, which might in turn be redistributed evenly to participants in the program, invested in local goods, and/or shared with the companies that design/build/install/maintain the doorbells.4
Calls, Emails, and Letters
The story for other forms of communication, such as phone calls, is similar to that of the doorbell solution. The main difference is that since the interaction is mediated by corporations, no government intervention is needed. In order to send out a large number of messages, customers of telecom companies are required to make an initial deposit. If all goes well, this deposit is later returned when the customer cancels their account (or simply credited to their final bill). But if the people they're contacting mark their messages as spam, a portion of the deposit is forfeit to the telecom.
The specific interface for marking a letter, email, or call as spam depends on the medium and the company providing the service. For instance, there might be a spot near each mailbox to drop spam letters. Or there might be a button on the telephone to flag a spam call. But regardless, since it’s the communications company that pockets the deposit in the case of an unwanted communication, it’s in each company’s interest to make it easy for recipients to express their annoyance.
Nothing stops a company from emerging that doesn’t require a deposit from its customers, but this is risky for two reasons:
For a user of that service, the absence of spam penalties mean an increased risk of getting spammed, which might be more annoying than the one-time deposit.
For a standardized service like email, where people using one provider need to be able to contact people signed up with another provider, the company is taking on a risk whenever it attempts to establish a connection with someone using a service with a spam penalty.
The combination of these effects means that most communications providers offer this kind of spam protection, and require some kind of deposit from users that send out a large number of messages. But thanks to free market dynamics, companies can compete to find the best prices (e.g. $0.07/email vs $0.12/email), while still discouraging spam.
Utopian Spam Penalties
You might be wondering why communication deposits and spam penalties only exist in Utopia, and not our world. Indeed, I find this somewhat confusing, myself. As best I can tell there are two stories for why our world is lacking.
The first explanation is that, in many contexts, the communication medium emerged before the technology needed to enforce payment. Knocking on doors showed up before doorbells. Email emerged well before any digital payments. Phone calls and letters became widespread prior to information processing technologies needed to make tracking deposits/refunds efficient. Even though the cost of doing these things today, with modern digital payment systems and computing would be straightforward, it would involve a non-trivial up-front cost of transitioning the infrastructure and adapting to the new system.
The second story is that there are established special-interests, namely advertising companies and departments, which have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. In some cases, such as physical mail, it’s also plausibly in the interest of the post office to avoid adding fees to spammers, who buy a lot of stamps, and are thus a primary customer they don’t want to antagonize.
My guess is that this is largely a question of technology following (or not following) culture. In Utopia, where there’s a culture of treating focus and attention as highly valuable, consumers of communication technologies demand ways to punish those who bother them, and the providers of those technologies provide. In our world, where distraction is the norm, there isn’t that market pressure, and so we get lots of spam.
In Utopia, there isn’t much need to track spam numbers in databases, screen calls, throw out piles of credit card offers from the mailbox, or train artificial intelligences to filter email. Communication is more signal and less noise. This comes with the trade-off of typically having to pay very slightly more for service like email, if for no other reason than to cover the insurance deposit for wasting someone’s time. But, for most Utopians, this cost is worth the benefit of the marginal peace and quiet.5
If the residents don’t have a special doorbell, it’s the same situation as our world. If there’s a fire or other such emergency, it stops being illegal. Use common sense etc.
Paying the doorbell with cash is probably too inefficient to be worth implementing. Payment with credit card also seems too high-friction if the credit-card reader is forced to confirm the transaction over the internet before ringing the bell. The preferred solution seem to me to be having a device (perhaps just a card, but also plausibly a phone or fob) that electronically submits a public key to the doorknob. If that key isn’t blacklisted, the door chimes and the key is temporarily stored. If the resident chooses to punish the ringer, the key is submitted to a local government database. If the owner of the key doesn’t pay their bill (or their deposit runs out) their key becomes blacklisted.
The core thing to avoid, incentive-wise, is residents keeping the money for themselves. If occupants keep the fee, it means that it’s in their interest to invite canvassers or salespeople or whomever to ring the bell only to then take their money and slam the door in their faces, reducing trust in the system for door-to-door solicitors who expect to get refunds if they think they’re welcome.
Increased emphasis on fancy doorbells probably means more adoption of “smart doorbells” with integrated cameras, et cetera, in Utopia. The pros and cons of such devices are mostly beyond the scope of this essay, but I want to briefly note that these kinds of home security systems can provide a nice, low-distraction alternative for noticing deliveries compared to having the delivery-drivers knock on one’s door.
And of course, since all of this is market-based and/or operating at local scales, if someone cares enough about avoiding having to deal with deposits, they can opt-out by living in places without such laws, and avoid communications platforms that use spam penalties.