Re: [Asrg] Another criteria for "what is spam"...

> From: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com>

> ...
> If CNN's recipient list meets the criteria you outline then the bulk
> mailing must be delivered for free and without interference.
>
> Who exactly is to provide these bottomless resources is not your
> concern, resources must be provided because it'd be FAIR, and we all
> know the world is free of starving children, people w/o proper medical
> care, and victims of despots, because if it's FAIR then it's field of
> dreams, the resources must appear. ....

That and the following is equivalent to UPS whining about the cost of
delivering all of those packages.  Instead, the people who solicited
CNN's stuff should be paying you just as they also pay you for the
GBytes of dirty pictures they fetch with FTP and HTTP and the GBytess
of pirated MP3s they fetch with "file sharing" protocols.

Or do you run one of those ISPs that claims to provide something for
nothing?

> Which is one main reason I'm suggesting we focus down on the illegal
> and unethical (by which I mean "ought to be illegal if not") methods
> the worst spammers use.
>
> The main reasoning being that I think we can all pretty well
> understand identity forging, open relays, viruses etc, as bad things
> which need to be contained.

Focusing on those sounds ok, for a while.  What do you want to do about
them?  As far as I can tell, they're all against various laws.  New laws
passed by the IRTF or IETF are unlikely to be effective until the IETF's
request to purchase guns for the IESG is approved by the ISOC.
I doubt that the real lawmakers would pay attention to recommendations
from these parts, particularly after their generous campaign donors
drop a few hints, but the effort might not hurt.

If you are urging technical solutions such as authentication to
reduce forgery, perhaps you could start by fixing that your own
SMTP systems to do SMTP-TLS.

> But on the bigger issue, with all due respect, I think the naivete'
> being displayed here is alarming.
>
> As I've said, those multi-billion dollar big company ad budgets are
> just waiting for you (collective "you", "us") to solve all this and
> clear them a free, smooth road to travel on.

Various things displayed here are alarming, but what bothers me about
our current exchange is that a businessman doesn't seem to want to
admit that he has customers and that providing the services those
customers want, including receiving mail from CNN, might not be free
for him to provide.

Without any undue respect, you need to stop and look for stubborn
infections of the old dot-bomb, new-economy, money-for-nothing syndrome.
If your customers spend to many Gbits/sec of your bandwidth on
baseball scores from CNN, the sane thing is to charge them more.

Yes, I intend the implication.   Those of your customers that receive
GBytes of mail, whether they consider it "spam" or not, should pay
you for your services.  If you want to keep them as customers, you
might also consider helping them to avoid unwanted mail with filters
or whatever else you consider effective.

Vernon Schryver    vjs@rhyolite.com

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