"If I, as an business, want to assert that my mailings meet that standard, I pony up for the license and add the headers. If don't pony up and use it anyways, I get sued. If I pony up and break the terms, I get sued.

"Just like the Good Housekeeping Seal. If I want to put the GHS on my product, I have to advertise in GH and submit my product for testing in their labs."

You've gotta be kidding me! In order for this ridiculous system to work, it will have to be widely deployed. IOW, people are going to expect to be able to disregard all messages not bearing the authentication token.

So these people will have a 95-year copyright and an open-ended trademark (plus a 17 year patent!) on this authentication scheme. Any communications between users of this system depend ultimately on the goodwill of the system operators, who have no visible qualifactions to be arbiters of all communication (remember, it's at their discretion as to whether you qualify for their auth token on a free or for-pay basis) by email.

Moreover, if we assume that:

* These will not ever interfere with one-to-one communication (which means that they'll be useless in regard to 419 scams)

* These people, their heirs, successors and assigns, will, in perpetuity, honor this covenant

* These people will never go out of business and have their IP assets acquired by someone who violates the covenant

We are still faced with the fact that we are asking these people to sit in judgement as to which bulk communications are acceptable and which ones are unacceptable (is the EFF's weekly newsletter spam? What about mass-email devoted to informing people of the dangers of spam vigilantism?). We are granting them a license to levy a fee against all bulk communicators (if I have a blog with fifty readers on its mailing-list and a PayPal tipjar, do I have to pay these people royalties for the use of their haiku? What if EFF goes from 30,000 email subscribers to 100,000 subscribers? Do our royalties escalate? Do we go broke paying these Internet postmasters for their imprimaturs?)

I'm hardly a First Amendment purist, but this is raw, steaming Stalinism.