From: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb(_at_)guppylake(_dot_)com>
...
I'm not talking about any party to the real end-to-end email
transaction. I'm talking about intermediaries. I have no problem at
all with user-controlled filters that do whatever they want. It's when
an ISP starts doing these things on behalf of a user who doesn't
understand or want them that the problems arise.
That would be relevant to your situation if you had any contract
with those intermediaries, or if you had deigned to buy real Internet
access instead of some sort of data service that happens to use
TCP/IP and parts of the Internet.
Your trouble is that you are unwilling or unable to buy real Internet
access. The fact that what you get for $30/month is not Internet
access has nothing to do with evil intermediaries.
...
I don't claim any such right to send. In fact, I agree with you about
your right to block. But that right belongs to the you as the
recipient of the communication, not to a third party intermediary that
is not acting with the explicit approval of the recipient. Just as you
have the right to choose only "opt in" email, I have the right to
choose "opt out" email blocking. We need to preserve BOTH of those
rights. Eliminating the latter right is simply not the best way to fix
the problems with the former right.
That is a straw man. Other than some governments, no third parties
are interferring with your mail. There are ISPs acting in accordance
with contracts with their customers to block your mail. You are
demanding that ISPs violate their agreements with their customers
and pass your mail.
Whether the customers of those ISPs know what they are buying in
terms of DNS blacklists is irrelevant. It is also irrelevant whether
those customers are getting reasonable SLAs, floride in their water,
and honest government.
Your right to send mail stops at the border routers of your ISP.
Bzzt. Not in most Western countries it doesn't. In telephony, equal
access regulations have long ensured that telephone companies are
required to interconnect their systems and NOT make third party
decisions to block calls. But that doesn't stop you personally from
using caller-id information to filter my calls, or even from buying a
box that subscribes to a private blacklisting service. It's your
decision, not your ISP's.
While PTTs do regulate telephone service, Internet service is not
regulated that way in for most citizens of Western countries. Besides,
equivalents of the filtering you are complaining about is available
from telephone companies. Qwest sells various kinds of call blocking.
By your reasoning, it is ok for Qwest to block telemarketing calls
with inevitiably grossly inaccurate CID filters but not for Qwest to
block email with much more accurate mechanisms.
Whether your mail gets any farther depends entirely on the sufferance,
whim, and caprice of others.
Read your history. This is more or less what the 19th century phone
companies argued, and it's what governmental regulation of
communication in a democracy is *for*.
Yes, please do read your history, but not just the fairy tails of
early 20th Century equivalents of Microsoft and their pet government
regulators. The Communications Act of 1933 is widely seen outside
PTT marketing departments and naive socialists as a marketing coup
by the consortium that was AT&T and unrelated to real problems.
The ISP's like to claim "common
carrier" status when it's in their interest, but they should bear the
same responsibilities as well.
In fact almost all service providers do not claim "common carrier"
status. The few that do are not offering real Internet access.
If prospective targets of your mail
reject it because your IP address is divisible by 91, that is entirely
fair, appropriate, and not for anyone but the owners of your targeted
mailboxes to judge.
That is certainly one opinion, but the history of telecommunications
policy in the US and elsewhere is based on a rather different opinion.
Your claim would be right if you limited it to telephone and telegraph
services. The last 30 years of data services are differ. For example,
the PTTs often escaped government regulation by claiming their data
services differed from telephone services.
This is precisely where your argument falls apart: ISP's are
consolidating and becoming more and more like common carriers. Fork
example, at my home in a modern American city, I have precisely two
reasonably priced options if I want broadband: Cable and DSL.
Ultimately it is becoming a duopoly, and while that's better than a
monopoly, it just doesn't leave enough options for a fully
laissez-faire position to be realistic.
You are misrepresenting the services you from your local providers
as Internet access. It is not.
You are also misrepresenting DSL services. You can often buy DSL based
Internet access from distant providers, thanks to the wonders of ATM
clouds and other mechanisms. It often costs more than the service you
can buy locally, but that local service is often not Internet access.
It is often (in my view) a strangely crippled imitation that is to
Internet access as straw is to wheat.
You have that right, and also the right not to answer the phone when my
name comes up on caller-id. But your phone company doesn't have the
right to make the decision, on your behalf and without your consent,
to not cause your phone to ring. And no, acceptable use policies
aren't an adequate answer because the decreasing number of
consumer-level alternatives means I'm likely to be stuck with a AUP
that I find unacceptable.
You are not stuck with bad AUPs for Internet access. You could always
buy real Internet access elsewhere and use the data services of your
local providers to reach your real ISP. That you would have to pay
more than $30/month is just too bad. That I can't get $30/month
imitation non-Internet/cable modem service because I live in the woods
is also just too bad.
I don't see any difference between this situation and the situation
where, say, China uses its governmental/monopolistic powers to block
all email from Taiwan. It's an abridgement of a fundamental human
right to communicate, which I think trumps the rights of monopolistic
ISP's to cut their spam-related expenses. -- Nathaniel
That is offensive nonsense. The only right yours that is being abridged
is your supposed right to buy Internet access for $30/month.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com