I think it is different. With Piracy people want something (product/service/media). The quote from Gabe is about the fact that they are willing to pay for it, if it is convenient and affordable.

Nobody wants spam or the things promoted in the spam. The companies want attention from the users. I think the better version is targeted ads on Facebook, etc. Maybe that’s the closest analogy to Gabe’s quote.

> I wonder what the underlying problem is.

The underlying problem is that a sufficiently motivated spammer can target tens or hundreds of millions of people with their spam without too much effort.

As a result, every possible scam and spam with even the slightest possibility of converting 0.00001% of recipients can now be a viable spam campaign.

The underlying problem is that it’s so easy to scale spam to a lot of targets.

I think the deeper problem is sending an email (or a billion emails) triggers someone else's servers to do most of the work. Email is beautifully cooperative computing, but that means it can easily be taken advantage of.

I think you can exclude Netflix from that list. Streaming services have fractured into a dozen different ones so piracy has come back.

Still applies to games/music and probably audio books.

Spam is just the opposite, it is actually a pricing issue and not a service issue.

As long as the expected value per message of spam sent is positive, someone in the world will send as many messages as they are able to. You either fix this by raising their costs so that spam no longer has a positive expected value, remove their ability to send an unlimited number of messages, or both.

This is not exclusive to the e-mail system, robocalls are still a major annoyance, and the global telephone system is much more regulated. Mobile phones now automatically filter calls, even! It's wild.

Steam and Netflix made it possible for people to play/watch media more easily than going to the pirate bay.

What are spammers trying to accomplish, that a better product would prevent them from using email (that isn't just them shitting up the other service the way they shit up email)?