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.

Nobody is talking about TSA, what a non sequitur.

It doesn't have to go away entirely to be worth making a change. I get probably 100x more email spam than physical mail

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.

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.

How much more junk mail would we get if postage was free? Orders of magnitude more, I imagine.

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.

Companies have to pay for commercials and billboards, why don't those go away?

That escalated quickly